Metal dichalcogenides monolayers: novel catalysts for electrochemical hydrogen production

Catalyst-driven electrolysis of water is considered as a "cleanest" way for hydrogen production. Finding cheap and abundant catalysts is critical to the large-scale implementation of the technology. Two-dimensional metal dichalcogenides nanostructures have attracted increasing attention because of their catalytic performances in water electrolysis. In this work, we systematically investigate the hydrogen evolution reduction of metal dichalcogenides monolayers based on density-functional-theory calculations. We find that metal disulfide monolayers show better catalytic performance on hydrogen production than other metal dichalcogenides. We show that their hydrogen evolution reduction strongly depends on the hydrogen coverage and the catalytic performance reduces with the increment of coverage because of hydrogenation-induced lower conductivity. We further show that the catalytic performance of vanadium disulfide monolayer is comparable to that of Pt at lower hydrogen coverage and the performance at higher coverage can be improved by hybridizing with conducting nanomaterials to enhance conductivity. These metal disulfide monolayers with lower overpotentials may apply to water electrolysis for hydrogen production.