Facile synthesis of coral-like Pt nanoparticles/MXene (Ti3C2Tx) with efficient hydrogen evolution reaction activity

Exploring efficient catalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is one of focus points of energy research. In this work, a series of MXene/Pt-x (wherein, x is the adding amount of 6.2 mM H2PtCl6 solution) nanomaterials were fabricated via a facile synthesis method, in which coral-like Pt nanoparticles (NPs) were deposited on Ti3C2Tx MXene. The Pt-loading amounts on the MXene could be simply controlled by varying the adding amounts of H2PtCl6, which would influence the sizes of Pt NPs on the MXene. The optimum catalytic activity was obtained on the MXene/Pt-3 with a low overpotential of 302 mV versus reversible hydrogen electrode (RHE) at 10 mA cm−2, which was about 84 mV less than MXene/Pt-2. The efficiently electrocatalytic HER activity of MXene/Pt-x nanomaterials was due to the electron transfer from MXene to Pt NPs. The HER performance of the MXene/Pt-x nanomaterials was influenced by both Pt-loading amounts and Pt particle sizes. This work expands future applications of MXene-based nanomaterials in clean energy conversion reactions.