Growth of carbon nanotubes coated CoP as electrocatalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction under acidic and alkaline solutions

The development of phosphide-based electrocatalyst with excellent properties and good stability under both acidic and alkaline condition is the hotspot of recent research. Herein, we synthesized N doped CoP coated with carbon nanotubes ([email protected]) electrocatalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), in which, the ZIF-67 (ZIF = zeolite imidazole skeleton) nanoparticles wrapped Co-MOF (MOF = metal-organic skeleton) nanorods has been used as precursor. The improvement of catalytic performance of N-doped CoP can be attributed to the fact that the introduction of N can optimize the electronic structure and the in-situ grown carbon nanotubes can improve charge transfer rate and avoid the agglomeration of active units. In addition, the effect of phosphorization temperature and the amount of carbon nanotube on the electrochemical activity of the samples were also investigated, and the obtained [email protected] only required low overpotential of 250 mV and 234 mV to drive the current density of 100 mA cm−2 under acidic and basic conditions, respectively. This work opens up an efficient paradigm for optimizing the performance of electrocatalysts.