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A bottom-up, template-free route to mesoporous N-doped carbons for efficient oxygen electroreduction

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Abstract

Herein, we report a facile, bottom-up route to the preparation of N-doped carbons with a high surface area as well as plenty of hierarchical pores by thermal annealing the black bread-like sulfuric acid-dehydrated sucrose. This simple sulfuric acid treatment created a remarkable surface area of 645.7 m2/g in the dehydrated sucrose, and the subsequent thermal annealing with activated reagent ZnCl2 and nitrogen source NH4Cl helped further generated more porous textures in the carbon matrix, which contributes to a high surface area of 2450 m2/g, a large number of hierarchical pores ranging from 2 to 150 nm in a highly porous N-doped carbon to sufficiently expose active sites and boost mass transfer. The best sample N/PC-800, which was thermally annealed at 800 °C, is able to selectively catalyze the 4e− ORR process and shows higher working stability, stronger tolerance to methanol crossover effect, a very comparable onset potential and diffusion-limited current density in alkaline electrolyte, compared to the benchmark Pt/C catalyst. The results in this study signify the validity of present facile, robust template-free method in the synthesis of highly porous N-doped carbons for electrochemical energy conversion and storage.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC 51402111 and NSFC 21373061), Guangdong Innovative and Entrepreneurial Research Team Program (2014ZT05N200) and the Key Project for Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (2014A030311038, 2016A030313733).

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  1. Jinghao Wu and Ji Liu have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Pharmacy, Guangdong Pharmaceutical University, Guangzhou, 510006, People’s Republic of China

    Jinghao Wu & Xiufang Wang

  2. New Energy Research Institute, College of Environment and Energy, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510006, People’s Republic of China

    Ji Liu & Ligui Li

  3. Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Environment and Pollution Control, College of Environment and Energy, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510006, People’s Republic of China

    Ligui Li

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  1. Jinghao Wu
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  2. Ji Liu
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  4. Xiufang Wang
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Correspondence to Ligui Li or Xiufang Wang.

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Wu, J., Liu, J., Li, L. et al. A bottom-up, template-free route to mesoporous N-doped carbons for efficient oxygen electroreduction. J Mater Sci 52, 9794–9805 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-017-1165-8

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