Interfacial electron design of Pd-based bimetallic phosphide nanoparticles to promote hydrogen evolution reaction

Recently, constructing low-cost, high-efficiency hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) catalysts for electrocatalytic water splitting remains a difficult challenge to break the bottleneck. Here we design an excellent interfacial engineering tactics to enhance the HER performance of Pd-based bimetallic phosphide nanoparticles by co-doping of transition metal (Fe, Co and Ni) elements on carbon nanofibers (CNF). The optimized PdFeP@CNF possesses the increase active sites and large exchange current density (j0) which exhibits the highest active HER performance with the lowest overpotentials of 13.2, 40.8, 77.6 and 120 mV at current densities of 10, 100, 200 and 400 mA cm−2 in 0.5 M H2SO4 solution, respectively. Moreover, PdFeP@CNF also shows fabulous stability for 100 h with no decrease at the current density. It is found that interfacial-bond-induced electron between Pd and transition metal phosphides can optimize the intrinsic activity then accelerate HER performance. This protocol provides a new approach to fabricate bimetallic phosphide nanoparticles for optimizing its catalytic performance.