Phosphorus doped few layer WS <sub>2</sub> flakes grown by chemical vapor deposition for hydrogen evolution reactions

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Abstract

Water splitting is a promising pathway for hydrogen production, providing an environmentally friendly fuel source. More recently, great attention has been given to transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) because of their interesting chemical and physical properties. In particular, tungsten disulfide (WS ₂) has garnered significant attention as a catalyst for this application due to its unique layered 2D structure. In this study, few-layered WS ₂ and phosphorus-doped WS ₂ (WS ₂/P) nanoflakes are synthesized on SiO ₂/Si substrates as electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reactions (HER) in acidic conditions. Analyses of the synthesized WS ₂ and WS ₂/P films reveal that the few-layered WS ₂ is of high quality, exhibiting continuity and uniformity. The presence of a strong peak in the photoluminescence spectrum confirms the mono/few layer nature of the synthesized samples. In additionally, scanning force microscopy in quantitative imaging mode reveals that the thinnest layers observed on the substrate have a height of 1.35 nm, indicating the presence of double-layer WS ₂. The WS ₂/P electrocatalyst demonstrates superior HER performance compared to pristine WS ₂, showing a low overpotential of 245 mV at 10 mA.cm ⁻² and a small Tafel slope of 123 mV.dec ⁻¹. Furthermore, WS ₂/P exhibits a greater electrochemical surface area and excellent catalytic stability under acidic conditions. Consequently, few layer phosphorus-doped WS ₂ proves to be a highly suitable electrocatalyst for hydrogen production compared to the WS ₂.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-025-90341-4.

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Most cited references 74

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2D transition metal dichalcogenides

Oleg Yazyev, Diego José Pasquier, Dmitry A. Ovchinnikov … (2017)

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High-mobility three-atom-thick semiconducting films with wafer-scale homogeneity.

Kibum Kang, Saien Xie, Lujie Huang … (2015)

The large-scale growth of semiconducting thin films forms the basis of modern electronics and optoelectronics. A decrease in film thickness to the ultimate limit of the atomic, sub-nanometre length scale, a difficult limit for traditional semiconductors (such as Si and GaAs), would bring wide benefits for applications in ultrathin and flexible electronics, photovoltaics and display technology. For this, transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), which can form stable three-atom-thick monolayers, provide ideal semiconducting materials with high electrical carrier mobility, and their large-scale growth on insulating substrates would enable the batch fabrication of atomically thin high-performance transistors and photodetectors on a technologically relevant scale without film transfer. In addition, their unique electronic band structures provide novel ways of enhancing the functionalities of such devices, including the large excitonic effect, bandgap modulation, indirect-to-direct bandgap transition, piezoelectricity and valleytronics. However, the large-scale growth of monolayer TMD films with spatial homogeneity and high electrical performance remains an unsolved challenge. Here we report the preparation of high-mobility 4-inch wafer-scale films of monolayer molybdenum disulphide (MoS2) and tungsten disulphide, grown directly on insulating SiO2 substrates, with excellent spatial homogeneity over the entire films. They are grown with a newly developed, metal-organic chemical vapour deposition technique, and show high electrical performance, including an electron mobility of 30 cm(2) V(-1) s(-1) at room temperature and 114 cm(2) V(-1) s(-1) at 90 K for MoS2, with little dependence on position or channel length. With the use of these films we successfully demonstrate the wafer-scale batch fabrication of high-performance monolayer MoS2 field-effect transistors with a 99% device yield and the multi-level fabrication of vertically stacked transistor devices for three-dimensional circuitry. Our work is a step towards the realization of atomically thin integrated circuitry.

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Enhanced catalytic activity in strained chemically exfoliated WS2 nanosheets for hydrogen evolution

Damien Voiry, Hisato Yamaguchi, Junwen Li … (2013)

Efficient evolution of hydrogen through electrocatalysis at low overpotentials holds tremendous promise for clean energy. Hydrogen evolution can be easily achieved by electrolysis at large potentials that can be lowered with expensive platinum-based catalysts. Replacement of Pt with inexpensive, earth-abundant electrocatalysts would be significantly beneficial for clean and efficient hydrogen evolution. To this end, promising results have been reported using 2H (trigonal prismatic) XS₂ (where X = Mo or W) nanoparticles with a high concentration of metallic edges. The key challenges for XS₂ are increasing the number and catalytic activity of active sites. Here we report monolayered nanosheets of chemically exfoliated WS₂ as efficient catalysts for hydrogen evolution with very low overpotentials. Analyses indicate that the enhanced electrocatalytic activity of WS₂ is associated with the high concentration of the strained metallic 1T (octahedral) phase in the as-exfoliated nanosheets. Our results suggest that chemically exfoliated WS₂ nanosheets are interesting catalysts for hydrogen evolution.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Ali Reyhani: reyhani@sci.ikiu.ac.ir

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Sci Rep

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Sci Rep

Title: Scientific Reports

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK (London )

ISSN (Electronic): 2045-2322

Publication date (Electronic): 21 February 2025

Publication date PMC-release: 21 February 2025

Publication date Collection: 2025

Volume: 15

Electronic Location Identifier: 6350

Affiliations

[1 ]Physics Department, Faculty of Science, Imam Khomeini International University, ( https://ror.org/02jeykk09) P.O. Box 34149-16818, Qazvin, Iran

[2 ]Physics Department, Amirkabir University of Technology, ( https://ror.org/04gzbav43) P. O. Box 15875-4413, Tehran, Iran

[3 ]Department of Physics, University of Sistan and Baluchestan, ( https://ror.org/02n43xw86) Zahedan, 98167-45845 Iran

[4 ]Fachbereich Physik, Freie Universität Berlin, ( https://ror.org/046ak2485) Arnimallee 14, 14195 Berlin, Germany

[5 ]Department of Physics, IRIS Adlershof & CSMB, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, ( https://ror.org/01hcx6992) 12489 Berlin, Germany

[6 ]Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Imam Khomeini International University, ( https://ror.org/02jeykk09) P.O. Box 34149-16818, Qazvin, Iran

Article

Publisher ID: 90341

DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-90341-4

PMC ID: 11845735

PubMed ID: 39984558

SO-VID: 71df8ddd-311f-4b2d-8685-1ee639c0e8f6

License:

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

History

Date received : 15 August 2024

Date accepted : 12 February 2025

Custom metadata

ScienceOpen disciplines: Uncategorized

Keywords: tungsten disulfide,phosphorus doped ws2 nanoflakes,hydrogen evolution reaction,electro-catalyst,water splitting,energy science and technology,materials science

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Uncategorized

Keywords: tungsten disulfide, phosphorus doped ws2 nanoflakes, hydrogen evolution reaction, electro-catalyst, water splitting, energy science and technology, materials science