Control of the metal-support interactions in Ru on N-doped graphene-encapsulated Ni nanoparticles to promote their hydrogen evolution reaction catalytic performance

Controlling metal-support interaction (MSI) is considered as an effective strategy to optimize the electronic structure of catalysts and thus promote their catalytic performance. Here, with the strong MSI by both metal core and nitrogen-doped carbon shell, the synthesized Ru supported on N-doped graphene-encapsulated Ni nanoparticles (Ni@NC/Ru) show excellent performance towards hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). It exhibits a very low HER potential of 28 mV at the current density of 10 mA cm−2, and high durability that the potential only increases approximately 7 mV after 10,000 cyclic voltammetry cycles. The high HER performance is attributed to the strong MSI from the tuning effect of Ni metal core and N-dope graphene shell, which optimizes the hydrogen binding energy of the catalysts. This study may shed light on the rational design of superior HER catalysts.