Facile preparation of CoO nanoparticles embedded N-doped porous carbon from conjugated microporous polymer for oxygen reduction reaction

Lingling Hu; Shuai Gu; Wenguang Yu; Weijie Zhang; Qiujian Xie; Chunyue Pan; Juntao Tang; Guipeng Yu

doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2019.11.079

Facile preparation of CoO nanoparticles embedded N-doped porous carbon from conjugated microporous polymer for oxygen reduction reaction

J Colloid Interface Sci. 2020 Mar 7:562:550-557. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2019.11.079. Epub 2019 Nov 20.

Authors

Lingling Hu¹, Shuai Gu¹, Wenguang Yu¹, Weijie Zhang¹, Qiujian Xie¹, Chunyue Pan¹, Juntao Tang², Guipeng Yu³

Affiliations

¹ College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, PR China.
² College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, PR China. Electronic address: reynard.tangjuntao@gmail.com.
³ College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, PR China. Electronic address: gilbertyu@csu.edu.cn.

PMID: 31771870
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2019.11.079

Abstract

Developing cost-effective approaches for fabricating porous carbon (PC) based catalysts with favourable oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) performance is highly significant for fuel-cell devices. Herein, we reported a precursor controlled, molten salt-templated approach to prepare ultrafine CoO nanoparticles embedded nitrogen-doped PC materials with high surface area (1236 m² g^-1) and large pore volume (0.68 cm³ g^-1). This method is simple and feasible, which produce CoO nanoparticles that were uniformly distributed on carbon skeleton with diameters in the range of 5-10 nm. The unexpected collapse of porous structures and agglomeration of metal nanoparticles were suppressed in the synthetic process. The as-made sample not only showed efficient catalytic activity towards ORR in alkaline media with a half wave potential (E_1/2) of 0.85 V (vs. RHE), but also exhibited better stability and stronger resistance to methanol than Pt/C.

Keywords: CoO nanoparticles; Conjugated microporous polymer; Electrocatalyst; Oxygen reduction; Porous carbon.