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

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.