Phase Engineering of Molybdenum Carbide/Oxide for Highly‐Efficient Electrocatalytic Hydrogen Production

Abstract Molybdenum carbide is one of non‐precious metal materials and it is a promising electrocatalyst for hydrogen production. Synthesis and improvement of molybdenum carbide's catalytic performance is of great significance. Herein, carbon‐based Mo 2 C with hybrid phase of MoO 2 was fabricated by matching the composition of Mo and C derived from pomelo peel and optimizing raw carbon amount and prolysis temperature. The resulting MoO 2 /Mo 2 C@C is composed of loose microspheres with mesoporous microstructure and is self‐assembled from nanoparticles. The results show that MoO 2 /Mo 2 C@C2 material exhibits excellent HER performance and only a low overpotentials of 143 mV is needed to drive the current density of 10 mA cm −2 in alkaline solution, and Tafel slopes are only 63.4 mV dec −1 , respectively. Notably, it has potential application at low overpotentials to drive large current density and this strategy also provides a universal route to prepare non‐noble metal catalyst with hybrid phase of oxide/carbide.