Integrating Amorphous Molybdenum Sulfide Nanosheets with a Co9S8@Ni3S2 Array as an Efficient Electrocatalyst for Overall Water Splitting

It is highly challenging to design low-cost, efficient electrocatalysts for both oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Herein, a hierarchical heterostructure was constructed on three-dimensional (3D) Ni foam, which contains Ni3S2 nanorods decorated with both Co9S8 and amorphous MoSx nanosheets and Ni3S2 nanowires decorated with amorphous MoSx nanosheets, namely, MoSx@Co9S8@Ni3S2/NF. The synergistic effects from the strong interactions of the heterointerface and unique hierarchical heterostructure endow the MoSx@Co9S8@Ni3S2/NF with abundant active sites and effective mass and electron transport pathways, resulting in excellent activity toward both HER and OER in 1 M KOH. It only gives a low overpotential of 76.5 mV to achieve 10 mA cm-2 for HER and a low overpotential of 310 mV to achieve 100 mA cm-2 for OER. Based on the superior catalytic activity of MoSx@Co9S8@Ni3S2/NF for OER and HER, we demonstrated the activity of overall water splitting using MoSx@Co9S8@Ni3S2/NF as both the anode and cathode. It shows a higher catalytic activity for overall water splitting with a low cell voltage of 1.52 V at 10 mA cm-2 than commercial Pt/C/NF||IrO2/NF (1.61 V) and superior stability. This work provides a platform for the design and preparation of efficient electrocatalysts with various hierarchical heterostructures.