Catalysis

Oxygen evolution

Engineering

Electrochemistry

Materials science

Water splitting

Inorganic chemistry

Chemical engineering

Electrocatalyst

Physical chemistry

Nanotechnology

Organic chemistry

Hydrothermal circulation

Cobalt

Chemistry

Electrode

Photocatalysis

Nanorod

Bifunctional

Electrochimica Acta

Development of transition metal-based catalysts to replace precious metal catalysts has significant meaning for overall water splitting. Here, we prepared cobalt-doped [email protected]2 core-shell nanorods ([email protected]2) as bifunctional catalyst through a simple one-step hydrothermal method. [email protected]2 catalyst could achieve brilliant electrocatalytic performance for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and overall water splitting. And [email protected]2 catalyst manifested small overpotentials at 50 mA cm−2 for both HER (139.9 mV) and OER (170.6 mV) catalytic performance in 1 M KOH solution. In addition, it displayed a cell voltage of 1.54 V at 50 mA cm−2 for overall water splitting, which is comparable with or surpasses the reported catalysts in the literatures. And [email protected]2 catalyst had superior stabilities for HER, OER and overall water splitting in 1 M KOH due to its unique core-shell structure and synergistic effects of NiS nanorods and MoS2 nanosheets.

One-step preparation of cobalt-doped NiS@MoS2 core-shell nanorods as bifunctional electrocatalyst for overall water splitting