Developing low-cost and highly active multifunctional electrocatalysts to replace noble metal catalysts is crucial for the commercialization of future clean energy technology. Herein, homogeneous CoS nanoparticles anchored on nitrogen and sulfur co-doped porous carbon nanomaterials (CoS@NSCs) are fabricated by pyrolysis of natural soybean treated with cobalt nitrate. The unique porous structures of the soybean are utilized to provide space for the oxidation and complexation reactions for cobalt compounds, thus leading to in situ generation of homogenously dispersed cobalt sulfide nanoparticles that anchored on the N,S co-doped carbon framework. Because of the coupling effect of cobalt sulfide and doping heteroatoms, CoS@NSC-800 not only displays excellent electrocatalytic performances with low overpotential and high current density toward both oxygen reduction reaction and oxygen evolution reaction comparable to the commercial Pt/C catalyst and IrO catalyst, but also might be a promising candidate for high-performance supercapacitors. The method for the preparation of the multifunctional hybrids is simple but effective for the formation of uniformly distributed metal sulfide nanoparticles anchored on carbon materials, therefore providing a new perspective for the design and synthesis of multifunctional electrocatalysts for electrochemical energy conversion and storage at a large scale.
The electrochemical CO2 reduction to desired chemical feedstocks is of importance, yet it is still challenging to obtain high production selectivity with low overpotential at a current density surpassing the industry benchmark of 100 mA cm−2. Herein, we constructed a low‐cost Zn single‐atom anchored on curved N‐doped carbon nanofibers (Zn SAs/N−C) by a facile noncovalent self‐assembly approach. At a low overpotential of only 330 mV, the Zn SAs/N−C exhibited simultaneously both a high current density up to 121.5 mA cm−2 and a CO FE of 94.7 %, superior to the previous reports. Experiments and DFT calculations revealed that the Zn atoms in Zn−N4 acted as the active sites, while adjacent pyridine‐N coupled with Zn−N4 could synergistically decrease the free energy barrier for intermediate *COOH formation. Importantly, the curvature of catalyst induced Zn 3d electrons that were bound to the Zn−N bonds to return to Zn atom, thereby leading to an increase in electron density of Zn and accelerating CO2 electroreduction to CO.
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