A novel cobalt tungstate and reduced graphene oxide composite for hydrogen evolution reaction in acid medium

[Display omitted] •CoWO4@rGO synthesized by simple precipitation method.•CoWO4@rGO catalyst exhibits good electrocatalytic activity of HER in 0.5 M H2SO4.•The onset potential of CoWO4@rGO catalyst is about 0.57 V (RHE).•CoWO4@rGO catalyst exhibits lower Tafel slope (142 mV/dec) than the CoWO4 and rGO. Due to the serious energy shortage and environmental pollution caused by fossil fuel, developing a renewable energy source is crucial. In this work, non-precious cobalt tungstate nanoparticles embedded reduced graphene oxide (CoWO4@rGO) based electrocatalyst is developed for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in an acidic medium. The fabricated catalyst shows a superior HER activity with an overpotential of −0.57 V versus reversible hydrogen electrode (RHE) at 10 mA/cm2 and a Tafel slope of 142 mV/dec. The work established a simple strategy to develop a stable and low-cost catalyst for HER, which attain great attention for the development of a clean energy landscape.