Co4N nanoparticles encapsulated in N-doped carbon box as tri-functional catalyst for Zn-air battery and overall water splitting

By Huaiyun Ge, Guangda Li, Jianxing Shen, Wenqing Ma, Xiangeng Meng, Liqiang Xu. 2020

183 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The rational design of high-performance tri-functional electrocatalysts plays an important role for the fast development of Zn-air batteries (ZABs) and water splitting and still remains a great challenge up to date. Herein, Co4N nanoparticles encapsulated in nitrogen doped carbon (Co4N@NC) composite has been conveniently fabricated which shows excellent stability over 750 h at 5 mA cm−2 and the voltage gap remain almost constant for long cycles. Flexible ZABs assembled based on this catalyst can be normally charged/discharged at any bent angles. Co4N@NC also can be used as HER catalyst to derive efficient splitting water under the ZABs which are assembled with Co4N@NC as ORR/OER catalyst. Density functional theory calculations reveal that N-doping in Co crystal could improve electronic conductivity, decrease the overpotential and accelerate reaction kinetics for OER/ORR. The above results indicate that Co4N@NC can be used as promising tri-functional high performance catalyst for Zn-air battery and overall water splitting.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8345a200579203ef2b24ad50512077fc979051d