Building up a view and understanding of the multifunctional activity of black phosphorous nanosheet modified with the metal atom

Abstract

Constructing metal-semiconductor interfaces by loading metal atoms onto two-dimensional material to build atomically dispersed single-atom catalysts (SACs) has emerged as a new frontier for improving atom utilization and designing multifunctional electrocatalysts. Nowadays, studies on black phosphorus nanosheets in electrocatalysis have received much attention and the successful preparation of metal nanoparticle/black phosphorus (BP) hybrid electrocatalysts indicates BP nanosheets can serve as a potential support platform for SACs. Herein, by using large-scale ab initio calculations, we explored a large composition space of SACs with transition metal atoms supported on BP monolayer (M-BP) and built a comprehensive picture of activity trend, stability, and electronic origin towards oxygen reduction and evolution reaction (ORR and OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). The results show that the catalytic activity can be widely tuned by reasonable regulation of metal atoms. Ni-, Pd-, and Pt-BP could effectively balance the binding strength of the target intermediates, thus achieving efficient bifunctional activity for OER and ORR. Favorable bifunctional catalytic performance for OER and HER can be realized on Rh-BP. Especially, Pt-BP exhibits promising trifunctional activity towards OER, ORR, and HER. Multiple-level corrections among overpotential, Gibbs free energy, orbital population, and d-band center reveal that the trend and origin of catalytic activity are intrinsically determined by the d-band center of metal sites. The thermodynamic and dynamic stability simulations demonstrate that the active metal centers are firmly anchored on BP substrate with intact M-P bonds. These findings provide a theoretical basis for the rational design of BP-based SACs toward promising multifunctional activity.