Ultra-long life rechargeable zinc-air battery based on high-performance trimetallic nitride and NCNT hybrid bifunctional electrocatalysts

By Mingjie Wu, Gaixia Zhang, Jinli Qiao, N. Chen, Weifeng Chen, Shuhui Sun. Nano Energy, 2019

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) bifunctional electrocatalysts are essential for rechargeable zinc-air batteries. Here, a novel design strategy is demonstrated for developing highly dispersed Fe2Ni2N/Co trimetallic nitride nanocrystals strongly coupled with N-doped carbon nanotubes (Fe2Ni2N/Co@NCNT). This unique hybrid catalyst exhibits superior electrocatalytic activity and stability toward both ORR and OER over most reported non-noble metal catalysts. The resulting zinc-air battery shows an impressively small charge–discharge voltage gap of 83 mV at 20 mA cm−2, as well as ultra-long cycling stability even exceeding 850 cycles (850 h) at 5 mA cm−2. Notably, we followed the changes of interatomic distance and local coordination of Fe Fe and Fe N bonds, using in situ XAFS to investigate the origins of the excellent structural stabilities of the Fe2Ni2N/Co@NCNT catalysts during electrocatalysis.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2f5983ec6c9c3445104f7546fb1d1abae3dba87a