A mini review on doped nickel-based electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction

Abstract

The energy crisis and environmental pollution have attracted much attention and have promoted researches on clean and sustainable hydrogen energy resources. With the help of highly active and stable transition metal nickel-based catalysts, the production of hydrogen from water electrolysis from electrolyzed water has become an inexpensive and efficient strategy for generating hydrogen energy. In recent years, heteroatom doping has been found to be an effective strategy to improve the electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) performances of nickel-based catalysts in acidic, neutral, and alkaline media. This review will highlight many recent works of inexpensive and readily available heteroatom-doped nickel-based HER catalysts. The evaluation methods for the performances of HER catalyst will be briefly described, and the role of heteroatom doping and its application in nickel-based catalyst will be summarized. This article will also point out some heteroatom doping strategies, which may provide references and inspire the design of other catalysts with dopants.