BACKGROUND: Environmental pollution and energy depletion are two serious problems that face mankind at present, so it is urgent to develop effective methods to deal with them. Electrochemistry offers a promising solution method owing to its fast, sensitive and clean properties. Since electrode materials are significantly important to improve electrochemical performance, studies of effective electrode materials have attracted increasing interest and become a research hotspot in recent years.
RESULTS:In this study, a novel multitasking electrode material 3D AgInS 2 /rGO was successfully prepared, the first to couple two important electrochemical functions of sensing and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) into one electrode material. It can highly sensitively detect 4-nitrophenol in real water over a wide concentration range with significantly low limit of detection, outstanding stability and anti-interference ability. Furthermore, it can effectively electrolyze water to produce H 2 by HER with low onset potential, low overpotential, small Tafel slope, good durability and high stability.CONCLUSION: The study indicates that the highly conductive 3D rGO scaffold decorated with nano AgInS 2 particles forms a nanohybrid, which produces positive synergistic effects to improve the electrochemical properties. This 3D AgInS 2 /rGO nanocomposite is considered to have high potential to deal with environmental problems owing to its high performance in the two important functions of contaminant sensing and HER.
Preparation of AgInS 2 /rGO/GCEThe GCE (3 mm diameter) was polished with 0.3 μm Al 2 O 3 powder and then sonicated in mixtures of nitric acid/water (1:1, v:v) and ethanol/water (1:1, v:v) for 5 min respectively. After that, the electrode was dried in air. As-prepared AgInS 2 /rGO was dispersed in water to get a 1 mg mL −1 dispersion; 12 μL of this AgInS 2 /rGO dispersion was dropped on the surface of the pre-cleaned GCE and then dried to obtain the AgInS 2 /rGO-modified GCE (denoted as AgInS 2 /rGO/GCE).
Preparation of AgInS 2 /rGO/NFIn the HER experiment, nickel foam (NF) (1 cm × 2 cm) was sequentially sonicated in hydrochloric acid, ethanol and deionized water wileyonlinelibrary.com/jctb