KENTECH Develops Technology for Green Hydrogen Efficiency and Stability... Achieves World-Leading Performance

(From left) Dr. Wansik Kim (first author), Professor Changhee Kim (corresponding author).

Korea Institute of Energy Technology (KENTECH) announced on November 4 that its research team has unveiled a new electrode technology capable of simultaneously improving both the efficiency and stability of green hydrogen production.

The research team led by Professor Changhee Kim from the Department of Energy Engineering at KENTECH developed a high-performance alkaline water electrolysis hydrogen evolution electrode based on molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) through a "large-area scalable fabrication process." They successfully verified its stability through evaluations simulating actual renewable energy environments.

Molybdenum disulfide is a next-generation non-precious metal electrode material that can achieve high catalytic activity in hydrogen evolution reactions by tuning its structure and electronic properties. Converting the inherently low-activity 2H phase to the 1T phase significantly enhances its catalytic activity, making it a promising candidate for practical electrode applications and the subject of active research. However, previous studies faced challenges in industrial applications due to limitations in precise nanoscale structural control and large-area processing. Structural control alone was insufficient to secure adequate catalytic activity.

To overcome these limitations, Professor Kim’s team introduced a "co-sputtering" technique, which enables large-area processing. By doping molybdenum disulfide with nickel (Ni) and precisely controlling power and deposition time, they increased the yield of the 1T phase and expanded the surface active area. As a result, they achieved significant improvements in charge transfer efficiency and catalytic activity.

In actual alkaline water electrolysis single-cell tests, the electrode achieved an efficiency of approximately 89% (current density of 0.4 A/cm²), surpassing the current global best. The team also conducted repeated start-stop evaluations to verify whether the electrode could operate stably under real renewable energy conditions, confirming that it maintained stable structure and performance even after repeated start-stop operations. This demonstrates that the results of this study go beyond performance improvement and are fully applicable to next-generation water electrolysis systems.

Professor Changhee Kim stated, "This research is significant in that we have realized a high-performance molybdenum disulfide electrode through a scalable process, thereby enhancing its potential for industrial application. Its proven stability under fluctuating renewable energy output lays an important foundation for accelerating the commercialization of green hydrogen."

In this study, Dr. Wansik Kim, a postdoctoral researcher at KENTECH, served as the first author, and Professor Changhee Kim was the corresponding author. The research results were presented at the "INDUSTRY WORKSHOP Advanced Alkaline Electrolysis," organized by Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute and attended by leading global companies in the field of water electrolysis.