Boosting Oxygen Reduction Catalysis with Fe–N4 Sites Decorated Porous Carbons toward Fuel Cells

By Z. Yang, Yu Wang, Mengzhao Zhu, Zhijun Li, Wenxing Chen, Weichen Wei, Tongwei Yuan, Yunteng Qu, Qian Xu, Changming Zhao and 5 more. ACS Catalysis, 2019

323 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is highly desired but remains a great challenge to develop nonprecious metal single-atom catalysts to supersede the Pt-based material for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). Herein, we report a porous nitrogen-doped carbon matrix catalyst with 3.5 wt % single Fe atoms (Fe SAs/N–C) through a versatile molecules-confined pyrolysis strategy. In 0.1 M KOH condition, the Fe SAs/N–C catalyst possesses a half-wave potential of 0.91 V vs RHE. In a more challenging acidic solution, Fe SAs/N–C catalyst also offers good ORR activity, comparable with the commercial Pt/C. Impressively, Fe SAs/N–C shows extremely high stability both in alkaline and acidic media. In addition, this Fe SAs/N–C-derived Zn–air battery and proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) exhibit high performance. This work opens an avenue for designing and preparing single-atom catalysts.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/472f6e8474d6c8c0ec2c575c9e67c13ccfe46a25