High-Throughput Production of Cheap Mineral-Based 2D Electrocatalysts for High-Current-Density Hydrogen Evolution

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable, cost-effective method to produce mineral-based 2D MoS2 electrocatalysts with high current density and stability for hydrogen evolution, utilizing abundant natural resources and simple heat treatment.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scalable exfoliation technique for mineral-based MoS2 catalysts, achieving high production rates and low costs suitable for industrial electrochemical applications.

Findings

Achieved 1000 mA/cm^2 current density at 454 mV overpotential for HER.

Produced catalyst with 1-2 orders of magnitude higher rate than previous methods.

Mineral-based catalyst costs five orders of magnitude less than Pt.

Abstract

The high-throughput scalable production of cheap, efficient and durable electrocatalysts that work well at high current densities demanded by industry is a great challenge for the large-scale implementation of electrochemical technologies. Here we report the production of a 2D MoS2-based ink-type electrocatalyst by a scalable top-down exfoliation technique followed by a simple heat treatment. The catalyst shows a high current density of 1000 mA cm^-2 at an overpotential of 454 mV for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) without the need of iR correction, as well as good stability over 24 hours. Using the same method, we have, for the first time, produced a cheap MoS2 mineral-based catalyst and found that it had an excellent performance for high-current-density HER. Noteworthy, production rate of this MoS2-based catalyst is one to two orders of magnitude higher than those previously reported. In addition, the price of the MoS2 mineral is five orders of magnitude lower than commercial Pt catalysts, making the MoS2 mineral-based catalyst cheap, and the ink-type catalyst dispersions can be easily integrated with other technologies for large-scale catalyst electrode preparation. These advantages indicate the huge potentials of this method and mineral-based cheap and abundant natural resources as catalysts in the electrochemical technologies.