Electrochemical water splitting by a bidirectional electrocatalyst.

The presence of efficient energy storage and conversion technologies is essential for the future energy infrastructure. Here, we describe crafting a heterostructure composed of a suitably interlinked CeO and polycrystalline BiO dopant prepared on a reduced graphene oxide (Ce_BiO@rGO) surface. This material exhibits exceptional electrocatalytic hydrogen and oxygen evolution reaction in alkaline water (pH∼14.

Co-doped carbon materials synthesized with polymeric precursors as bifunctional electrocatalysts.

The design of stable and high performance metal free bifunctional electrocatalysts is a necessity in alkaline zinc-air batteries for oxygen reduction and evolution reaction. In the present work co-doped carbon materials have been developed from polymeric precursors with abundant active sites to achieve bifunctional activity. A 3-dimensional microporous nitrogen-carbon (NC) and co-doped nitrogen-sulfur-carbon (NSC) and nitrogen-phosphorus-carbon (NPC) were synthesized using poly(2,5-benzimidazole) as an N containing precursor.