Iron/nitrogen/phosphorus co-doped three-dimensional porous carbon as a highly efficient electrocatalyst for oxygen reduction reaction

Jing Liu, Yuanyuan Zhu, Fanglin Du, Luhua Jiang^Z

Nanomaterials & Electrocatalysis Laboratory, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, 53 Zhengzhou Road, Qingdao, Shandong 266042, China

Abstract

Developing low cost, high active and stable non noble electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) is of great importance for the practical application of fuel cells. Herein, we develop a hydrogel-pyrolysis strategy to synthesize an active iron/nitrogen/phosphorous co-doped carbon electrocatalyst (denoted as PANI-Fe/PA-N1050) by adopting aniline, phytic acid and iron trichloride as the precursors. Compared with the mono-doped counterparts, PANI-Fe/PA-N1050 exhibits a superior ORR performance in terms of an initial half-wave potential of 0.84 V vs. RHE and degradation of 14 mV after 1000 cycles. The performance enhancement could be attributed to that (1) the crosslink of phytic acid and polyaniline forms a hydrogel, which after pyrolysis possesses high electrochemical surface area so that allows accommodating quantity of active sites; (2) the Fe, N, P triple-doping generates abundant active sites including Fe-N_x, graphitic N and P-doped carbon; (3) the charge transfer resistance decreases benefiting from the continuous 3D porous structure of carbon. The iron/nitrogen/phosphorous co-doped 3D porous carbon materials prepared by the facile and scalable hydrogel-pyrolysis route is also promising for the application in the fields of energy conversion/storage.

Keywords: Oxygen Reduction Reaction; Porous Carbon; Fe, N, P Co-doped; Electrocatalyst

 ^z Email: luhuajiang@qust.edu.cn  

DOI: 10.1149/2.1081912jes