Fluorinated MXenes accelerate the hydrogen evolution activity of in situ induced snowflake-like nano-Pt

Abstract

The development of water electrolysis hydrogen production technology is related to the process of large-scale application of green energy, but the high cost of Pt based materials with high catalytic activity that have been commercialized has slowed the pace of industrialization in this field owing to inherent scarcity. In this study, the surface modification technology was used to introduce closo-[B₁₂H₁₂]²⁻ with weak reduction ability into a two-dimensional MXene basal plane to realize the in situ evolution of Pt⁴⁺ into snowflake like Pt nanoclusters. The reported MXene/B-Pt enables highly efficient catalytic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) over the full pH range with an overpotential (η₁₀) as low as 20 mV and 14 mV under basic and acidic conditions, respectively. Overall, the HER performance of MXene/B-Pt surpasses that of commercial Pt/C catalysts by about an order of magnitude improvement in mass activity. For MXene/B-Pt, the snowflake-like Pt nanoparticles not only exposed more active sites, but –Ti and –F enhance the adsorption of active H* on Pt, leading to the high HER activity of MXene/B-Pt. In situ SEIIRAS well demonstrates that whether MXenes are loaded with Pt or not has a significant effect on the HER.