Embellished hollow spherical catalyst boosting activity and durability for oxygen reduction reaction
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Date
2018-09
Authors
Xu, Pan
Zhang, Jing
Jiang, Gaopeng
Hassan, Fathy Mohamed
Choi, Ja-Yeon
Fu, Xiaogang
Zamani, Pouyan
Yang, Lijun
Banham, Dustin
Ye, Siyu
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Elsevier
Abstract
Transition metals hybridized to heteroatom doped carbon material can be regarded as the most promising non-noble candidate for boosting the sluggish kinetics of oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). However, it has always been a challenge to vastly boost the activity, and simultaneously retain a favorable structure from the supporting material. Herein, we prepared a high surface area hollow spherical carbon as a supporting material, and employed aminothiophenol (ATI) and poly-aminothiophenol (PATI) as heteroatom precursors to synthesize nitrogen and sulfur co-doped catalysts, i.e. HCS-A and HCS-PA, respectively. The two catalysts possessed chemically similar surface composition, and nearly identical chemical states for each element. However, only HCS-A was able to vastly inherit both morphological advantage and high surface area from the carbon support. In further half-cell electrochemical testing, HCS-A performed better ORR activities and higher selectivity toward 4 electron pathway than HCS-PA in both acidic and alkaline media. Moreover, HCS-A was proven to have excellent durability in half-cell testing, methanol tolerance as well as outstanding peak power density in both fuel cells and zinc-air batteries. This work not only indicates the promising performances of HCS-A, but more importantly offers a new viewpoint on the selection of heteroatom precursor to retain a favorable structure.
Description
The final publication is available at Elsevier via https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nanoen.2018.07.031. © 2018. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Keywords
hollow sphere, oxygen reduction, non-precious catalyst, electron transfer number, PEM fuel cell, zinc-air battery