Electrocatalysis induced reconstruction of RuNiPO for highly efficient hydrogen evolution reaction

Reconstruction during the catalytic process has been considered to play a key role for the performance. Here we report a RuNiPO based catalyst for efficient alkaline hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), which can benefit from a long-term reconstruction during HER for 10 h to continuously increase the performance. The final catalyst (e-RuNiPO) shows a huge morphology change from bulk sphere to highly exposed layered structure in the electrocatalysis process, and exhibits an interesting electronic structure modification with the electron transfer from Ru to Ni for better interfacial interaction and quick charge transfer. Due to the favorable morphology with more exposed active sites and the optimized electronic structure, the final catalyst can achieve an outstanding performance with only an overpotential of 15 mV at 10 mA cm−2 (with a good stability more than 100 h), even outperforming the performance of benchmark 20 wt% Pt/C catalyst (18 mV at 10 mA cm−2) by using a much lower Ru content.