Oxygen vacancies engineering of TiO2 for boosting the catalytic activity of Ru in Ru/TiO2-x/CB

Oxygen-vacancy-rich TiO 2-x is uniformly coated on the surface of carbon black substrates. • Ru nanoparticles are highly dispersed on the TiO 2-x support. • TiO 2-x efficiently regulates the electronic structure of Ru sites, thus significantly boosting the electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution performance. The exploration of low cost, highly active, and stable catalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is the key to the future application of electrochemical water splitting. Herein, density functional theory (DFT) calculation results reveal that the oxygen vacancies TiO 2-x can effectively modulate the electron structure of Ru, thereby extremely enhancing the catalytic activity of Ru. Experimentally, to form an integrated nano-heterostructure, a facile approach is designed for the fabrication of super dispersed Ru nano particles on oxygen-deficient TiO 2-x , simultaneously combined with carbon black (CB) as a conductive network. Benefiting from the rich active sites, the optimized Ru/TiO 2-x /CB exhibited excellent catalytic performance, with overpotentials of 56 mV and 112 mV for the HER at a current density of 10 mA cm −2 in 1 M KOH and 0.5 M H 2 SO 4 , respectively. Ru/TiO 2-x /CB demonstrates superior stability and rapid HER kinetics under both acidic and alkaline conditions. Our studies provide a facile and feasible strategy for constructing high-performance water-splitting electrocatalysts. Download: Download high-res image (260KB) Download: Download full-size image