Industrial stainless steel meshes for efficient electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution

• Industrial 316 L stainless steel exhibit excellent electrocatalytic HER activity. • The HER activity was tuned by the mesh number. • The optimized 316 L SS-1600 obtains a low overpotential of 209.8 mV at 10 mA cm −2 and a small Tafel slope (115.6 mV dec −1 ). The electrocatalytic water splitting to hydrogen and oxygen plays a critical role on renewable energy conversion and storage, which relies heavily on the development of high-efficiency, low-cost and robust catalysts. Here, employing the industrial 316 L stainless steel (SS), the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) performance of a series of SS meshes with different mesh number (100–1600) were studied in acidic condition. The results exhibit that the cheap industrial 316 L SS meshes have excellent electrocatalytic HER activity. Meanwhile, the electrocatalytic HER performance of the 316 L SS meshes increases with the increase of mesh number. The HER activity was increased with the mesh number increases from 100 to 1600 meshes, where the optimized 316 L SS-1600 obtains a low overpotential of 209.8 mV at the current density of 10 mA cm −2 and a small Tafel slope (115.6 mV dec −1 ). However, with further increase of the mesh number from 1600 meshes to 2800 meshes, the HER performance started to decrease. A possible mechanism for the effect of the mesh number on HER performance was proposed, which can be ascribed to the electrochemical specific surface area and the tight interweaving of SS mesh for hydrogen release. This work provides an important direction for the performance improvement of the low-cost industrially available electrodes towards scale-up electrocatalytic hydrogen production and renewable energy storage.