Layered MoS2 supported on plastic-derived and nitrogen-doped activated carbon as an efficient catalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction

Water electrolysis driven by renewable electricity represents an eco-friendly and sustainable green energy technology. Molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2 ) stands out as an economical candidate catalyst toward the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), yet its practical application is hampered by inferior electrical conductivity and insufficient exposed active sites. This work reports an innovative study addressing these two challenges by fabricating a practical, low-cost nanoporous carbon catalyst support. The support is derived from waste plastic via pyrolysis and chemical activation. Subsequently, molybdenum disulfide is anchored onto the plastic-derived nitrogen-doped activated carbon (PNAC) through a scalable hydrothermal method to synthesize the composite catalyst MoS 2 @PNAC. The reason why this composite material has improved conductivity and can generate many defect sites is mainly due to the effect brought by PNAC. The MoS 2 @PNAC catalyst we synthesized only requires an overpotential of 117 mV to achieve a current density of 10 mA cm −2 , which is commonly used for hydrogen evolution reactions. Moreover, its long-term working stability is quite good, and the density functional theory (DFT) calculation results also confirm this.