Space confined growth of RuO2/Ru carbon nanorods for highly efficient electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution

Exploring efficient and robust electrocatalysts with low cost for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is critical for practical application of electrochemical water splitting. Ru-based platinum group electrocatalysts shows great potential in HER, however, Ru suffer from sluggish kinetics of water dissociation for electrochemical reduction of water to hydrogen in alkaline environments . Here, oxygen atoms are introduced into Ru by simple secondary heat treatment to form Ru–O–C bonds to weak the strength of Ru–H bond. The overpotential of the catalyst is only 19 mV at 10 mA cm −2 and the stability is greatly improved. Theoretical calculations reveal that the Ru–O–C structure formed in RuO 2 facilitates the dissociation of H–OH, which is the rate-determining step in alkaline electrolytes , leading to significant improvement in HER activity.