Hydrolysis for hydrogen production is one of the most efficient ways to produce hydrogen energy. In order to realize its wide application, people urgently need to find cheap and efficient metal-free electrocatalysts to replace the noble-metal electrocatalysts in hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Here, N-doped hierarchical porous carbon materials were successfully fabricated without any template. We changed the nitrogen and carbon source needed to prepare the material and tested HER performance. In all samples, the ethylenediamine-based porous carbon material (NPC-2) compared with other nonmetallic heteroatom doped carbon materials and some traditional metallic catalysts exhibited outstanding HER performance and stability in acid solution. To achieve a 10 mA/cm2 HER current density, the nitrogen-doped hierarchical porous carbon materials (NPC-2) required an overpotential of 398 mV.
