Modifying Commercial Carbon with Trace Amounts of ZIF to Prepare Derivatives with Superior ORR Activities.

Adv Mater

Key Lab of Organic Optoelectronics and Molecular Engineering, Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.

Published: July 2017

AI Article Synopsis

  • Researchers have developed a new method for enhancing the performance of oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) catalysts for membrane fuel cells, utilizing an absorption-reaction technique on carbon materials.
  • Pyrolysis of the coated carbon creates ORR catalysts that outperform commercial platinum-based catalysts in terms of activity and stability over 10,000 cycles.
  • The process is cost-effective due to the reduction of raw materials and simplified preparation methods, highlighting the essential roles of cobalt and nitrogen in catalyst performance.

Article Abstract

Reducing costs while maintaining high activities and stabilities of oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) catalysts has long been pursued for applications to membrane fuel cells. Here, an absorption-reaction method is used to prepare a zeolitic imidazolate framework coated commercial carbon, and the pyrolysis of such material brings about impressive ORR activities and stabilities with large diffusion-limited current density, half-wave potential, and no obvious decay after 10 000 cyclic voltammetry cycles, which is even better than that of the commercial Pt/C catalysts. The absorption-reaction method is realized by simply soaking the commercial carbon black sequentially in Co(NO ) and 2-methylimidazole solutions at ambient conditions. The detailed analysis on such carbon materials reveals that both Co and N are essential to activities, even the amount of N and Co species is very low. The reduction of raw materials and simplified handling procedures result in well-controlled costs in applications.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adma.201701354DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

commercial carbon
12
orr activities
8
activities stabilities
8
absorption-reaction method
8
modifying commercial
4
carbon
4
carbon trace
4
trace amounts
4
amounts zif
4
zif prepare
4

Similar Publications

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!