Tuning the Activity of Carbon for Electrocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution via an Iridium-Cobalt Alloy Core Encapsulated in Nitrogen-Doped Carbon Cages

Graphene, a 2D material consisting of a single layer of sp² -hybridized carbon, exhibits inert activity as an electrocatalyst, while the incorporation of heteroatoms (such as N) into the framework can tune its electronic properties. Because of the different electronegativity between N and C atoms, electrons will transfer from C to N in N-doped graphene nanosheets, changing inert C atoms adjacent to the N-dopants into active sites. Notwithstanding the achieved progress, its intrinsic activity in acidic media is still far from Pt/C. Here, a facile annealing strategy is adopted for Ir-doped metal-organic frameworks to synthesize IrCo nanoalloys encapsulated in N-doped graphene layers. The highly active electrocatalyst, with remarkably reduced Ir loading (1.56 wt%), achieves an ultralow Tafel slope of 23 mV dec^-1 and an overpotential of only 24 mV at a current density of 10 mA cm^-2 in 0.5 m sulfuric acid solution. Such superior performance is even superior to the noble-metal catalyst Pt. Surface structural and computational studies reveal that the superior behavior originates from the decreased ΔG_H* for HER induced by the electrons transferred from the alloy core to the graphene layers, which is beneficial for enhancing CH binding.