Electrocatalytic Activity of a 2D Phosphorene‐Based Heteroelectrocatalyst for Photoelectrochemical Cells

Regulation of 2D Graphene Materials for Electrocatalysis

Benefiting from unique excellent physical and chemical characteristics, graphene has attracted widespread attention in the application of electrocatalysis. As a promising candidate, graphene is usually regulated with surface defects, heteroatoms, metal atoms and other active materials through covalent or non-covalent bonds to substitute for noble metal catalysts, which has not been targeted in a report yet. In this review, we summarize the recent advances of approaches for engineering graphene-based electrocatalysts and emphasize the corresponding electrocatalytic active sites in various electrocatalysis circumstances, such as electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), oxygen evolution reaction (OER), oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), etc. The opportunities and challenges in the future development of graphene-based catalysts are also discussed.

Mechanical Behaviors of Angle-Ply Black Phosphorus by Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Regular black phosphorus (BP) sheets possess strongly anisotropic properties due to the unique puckered atomistic configuration, making such BP mechanically very weak in the armchair direction. The present work aims to address this issue by proposing an angle-ply double-layer black phosphorus (DLBP) structure in which two individual atomic layers with different orientation angles are stacked up. The molecular dynamics simulations based on Stillinger-Weber potential show that the in-plane mechanical properties of such a DLBP structure, e.g., Young’s modulus and tensile strength are significantly influenced by the stacking angle of each layer. The property anisotropy of DLBP decreases as the stacking angle difference δ between two layers increases and becomes isotropic when δ = 90°. This work also shed insight into mechanisms of angle-ply layers underlying the mechanical behaviors of DLBP at the nanoscale, suggesting that the anisotropic material properties can be effectively controlled and tuned through the appropriately selected stacking angles.