Rapid and energy-efficient microwave pyrolysis for high-yield production of highly-active bifunctional electrocatalysts for water splitting

By Huawei Huang, Si Zhou, Chang Yu, Hongling Huang, Jijun Zhao, L. Dai, Jieshan Qiu. 2020

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Functional materials with tuned nanostructure derived from metal–organic frameworks (MOF) hold great promise in energy storage/conversion and catalysis. Herein, we report a novel strategy to fabricate carbon fiber (CF)-supported cobalt nanocatalysts (Co-NC/CF) by a self-made “microreactor” consisted of randomly stacked graphene powder with the help of the microwave field. This newly-developed methodology can not only lead to a significantly enhanced yield of MOF-derived Co-NC up to 48.7 wt%, but also dramatically reduce the pyrolysis time (in just 60 s) and energy consumption (only 0.37% of traditional pyrolysis method). The experimental results combined with theoretical calculations revealed that the synthesized Co-NC/CF with optimized surface binding capability for reaction intermediates featured high-efficient catalytic activities for OER and HER owing to the electron transfer from cobalt to the surface carbon layers. The present microwave pyrolysis technique with an ultra-short synthesis cycle, high product yield and excellent energy efficiency, also demonstrated broad applicability for the synthesis of other MOF-derived functional materials.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f1dad45227b04d214757828ab5e17d3ec809568a