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Construction of hierarchical yolk-shell nanospheres organized by ultrafine Janus subunits for efficient overall water splitting.

Qi ZhangBingqiu LiuYue JiLihua ChenLingyu ZhangLu LiChun-Gang Wang
Published in: Nanoscale (2020)
Although the bimetal sulfide is intensively pursued in catalytic systems, synthesis of ultrafine sized bimetal sulfide Janus subunits is still a great challenge. In this work, ultrafine NiS2/MoS2 Janus subunits organized on yolk-shell nanospheres (NSs) are synthesized by a novel and facile approach. The greatly reduced particle size of both two-dimensional MoS2 and one-dimensional NiS2 on the ultrafine NiS2/MoS2 Janus subunits endows the yolk-shell NSs with numerous intimate interfaces of bimetal sulfide hybrids greatly promoting the intimate electronic interaction and dissociation of water molecules. Benefiting from the ultrafine NiS2/MoS2 Janus subunits, abundant edge sites and the high density of interfaces, the as-prepared NiS2/MoS2 yolk-shell NSs exhibit high electrocatalytic activity with a low η10 value of 135 and 293 mV for the HER and OER, respectively. In addition, a low cell voltage (1.58 V) is achieved by using NiS2/MoS2 yolk-shell NSs as both anode and cathode. This study has significant indications in exploring the ultrafine nanoparticles for the water splitting reaction, fuel cells and organic synthesis.
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