Research Projects

The high distribution of clean and eco-friendly energy technology such as fuel cells, metal-air batteries, and hydrogen production relies on the efficiency of the electrocatalytic reactions including oxygen evolution reaction (OER), hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), and oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). Recently, MXene and its composite with metal sulfide materials have attracted increasing attention among researchers owing to their fascinating functionalities and diversities which seem to be a suitable alternative to noble metal electrocatalysts. In particular, the synthesis of the binder-free MXene/bimetal sulfides materials system to achieve the bifunctional catalytic activity and target the specific energy conversion applications, namely OER and HER for electrocatalytic water splitting is of great importance. In this proposal, a new class of MXene composite with bimetal sulfides on nickel foam will be synthesized by simple electrodeposition in different cycles and time durations to control the morphology thereby tunning the efficiency and stability of the material. Since the MXene composite with transition bimetal sulfides on Ni foam exhibits higher electrocatalytic activities for oxygen evolution and hydrogen evolution reactions (OER and HER), we expected that these materials' catalytic activity is higher than the commercial Pt/C and RuO2 catalysts, respectively. The synthesized material will be systematically characterized by using XRD, FT-IR, Raman, BET, FESEM, HRTEM and XPS analysis. And then, the electrochemical characterization will be carried out in a three-electrode system in both acidic and alkaline mediums for comparison.