Conductive Tungsten Oxide Nanosheets for Highly Efficient Hydrogen Evolution

Exploring efficient and economical electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction is of great significance for water splitting on an industrial scale. Tungsten oxide, WO3, has been long expected to be a promising non-precious-metal electrocatalyst for hydrogen production. However, the poor intrinsic activity of this material hampers its development. Herein, we design a highly efficient hydrogen evolution electrocatalyst via introducing oxygen vacancies into WO3 nanosheets. Our first-principles calculations demonstrate that the gap states introduced by O vacancies make WO3 act as a degenerate semiconductor with high conductivity and desirable hydrogen adsorption free energy. Experimentally, we prepared WO3 nanosheets rich in oxygen vacancies via a liquid exfoliation, which indeed exhibits the typical character of a degenerate semiconductor. When evaluated by hydrogen evolution, the nanosheets display superior performance with a small overpotential of 38 mV at 10 mA cm–2 and a low Tafel slope of 38 mV dec–1. This work opens an effective route to develop conductive tungsten oxide as a potential alternative to the state-of-the-art platinum for hydrogen evolution.