Potential and support-dependent hydrogen evolution reaction activation energies on sulfur vacancies of MoS2 from GC-DFT

We present a detailed mechanistic study of HER at the sulfur vacancy VS of 2H–MoS2. We evaluate the Volmer, Tafel, and Heyrovsky transition states for the different possible reaction steps, determining the activation energy as a function of the electrochemical potential via grand-canonical density functional theory. The results show that the Volmer and Heyrovsky steps depend on the electrochemical potential and the activation energies decrease for more negative potentials, while this is not the case for the Tafel step, for which the activation energy is constant. From the activation energies at −0.2 V vs SHE, it can be concluded that during HER on VS a first hydrogen atom is adsorbed as a spectator via a Volmer step. Then, the catalytic cycle consists of a Volmer and a Heyrovsky step, with the latter being rate determining. In addition, we investigate for the first time the effect of a conductive support on the HER activity of these sulfur vacancies. Our results show that copper, gold and graphite supports have little effects on the activation energies of all steps. Hence, we conclude that cheap, acid-stable, high-surface area carbon supports are well suited for MoS2-based HER catalysts. [Display omitted] •Potential-dependent activation energies reveal the HER mechanism on S-defects of MoS2 as Volmer- Heyrovsky with a spectator H∗.•The defect density has little influence on the S-vacancy based HER kinetics.•Support and nanosheet size effects are found to be small, hence large specific surface area carbon supports are adequate.