Electrolysis of water for hydrogen production has garnered significant attention due to its advantages of high purity and pollution-free process. The performance of catalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) under acidic conditions is quite active, but the stability of these catalysts is limited by corrosion, especially at industrial current densities. Currently, platinum (Pt)-based catalysts are considered to be among the most effective and are widely used in industrial production. Nevertheless, the scarcity of noble metals and their poor stability have restricted the large-scale industrial application of water electrolysis for hydrogen production. Therefore, designing a catalyst with low noble metal usage that operates under acidic conditions and industrial current densities has become a research focus. To this end, Prof. Wang Lei's team chose WO3 as the carrier for Pt nanoparticles and employed Co doping and NH3 treatment to significantly enhance the activity and stability of the catalyst while reducing the amount of Pt used. The prepared Pt/N-CoWO3 catalyst exhibited overpotentials of only 94 and 108 mV at current densities of 1 and 2 A cm-2 in acidic media, respectively; more importantly, the catalyst operated stably for 2000 hours at a current density of 1 A cm-2, which is the best HER performance reported to date under acidic conditions. Experimental and theoretical calculations suggest that the formation of Pt-N/O bonds effectively enhances the stability of the active Pt species, while the introduction of Co modulates the catalyst morphology, enhancing its physical stability.The synergistic effect of Co and N significantly improves the overall performance of the catalyst. This work opens up new way for the development of highly active hydrogen evolution catalysts with long-term operation and synergistic multi-functional sites under acidic conditions.

The related work has been published in the international energy journal Advanced Energy Materials (Impact Factor: 27.8), titled "Modulating Pt-N/O Bonds on Co-doped WO3 for Acid Electrocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution with Over 2000 h Operation". The first author of the paper is Chen Hengyi, a doctoral student from College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at IMU, along with Yu Jidong, a master's student, and Lijia Liu from the University of Western Ontario. Prof. Wu Limin, Prof. Wang Lei, and Researcher Fellow Gao Ruiting are the co-corresponding authors. This research is supported by the Key Research and Development Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology for nano-specific projects, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Grassland Talent Plan project of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.