Enhancement of electrochemical and catalytic properties of MoS2 through ball-milling

• Natural MoS2 is ball-milled.
• Electrochemistry and catalytic properties of ball-milled MoS2 are investigated.
• Ball-milling process enhances both the electrochemistry and the catalytic behavior of natural MoS2.

MoS2 nanosheets of one to few layer thickness present novel electronic and enhanced catalytic properties with respect to the bulk material. Here we show that a simple and highly scalable ball-milling procedure can lead to significant improvements of the electrochemical and catalytic properties of the bulk natural MoS2. We characterized the material before and after the milling process by means of scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy in order to evaluate morphological and chemical features. We investigated the electrochemical properties by means of voltammetry techniques to monitor the electron transfer with [Fe(CN)6]4 −/3 − redox probe and the catalytic properties by monitoring the electrochemical hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). A significant overpotential lowering of about 210 mV is obtained for the HER by the ball-milled material when compared to bulk materials. This has a huge potential for the lowering of the energy consumption during hydrogen evolution. Ball-milling offers highly scalable dry method for large scale production of electrocatalyst with enhanced properties.

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