Fuel cells are widely recognized as very attractive devices to obtain directly electric energy through an electrochemical reaction between anode and cathode 1 . Among the power sources, direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs) have been extensively investigated and proposed to be used as mobile applications 2 . Compared to methanol, ethanol is a promising alternative fuel with less toxicity. Direct ethanol fuel cells (DEFCs) have been extensive studied by many research groups [3][4][5][6] . As emerging technologies, DEFCs have many challenges that need to be addressed. One of the major hurdles of the DEFCs is the ethanol electrooxidation reaction which exists slow sluggish kinetics due to the twelve-electron transfer process 7,8 . Platinum (Pt) and Pt-based nanoparticles have been generally used as the acceptable anode materials for the electrooxidation of liquid fuels such as methanol and ethanol 9-11 . Unfortunately, high cost and susceptible to poisoning by CO make it practically impossible to be an ideal candidate at a commercial level. Therefore, exploring cost-effective and catalytically active materials is of great interest to study.Compared with Pt, palladium (Pd) has numerous advantages in the DEFCs 9,10,12-15 . Xu and Shen 9,16 firstly found that Pd-based catalysts have remarkable activity for ethanol oxidation in alkaline media in 2006. However, it is still necessary to decrease the dosage of Pd and lower the catalyst cost. Lots of methods have been proposed such as modifying Pd particles with transition metal oxides including NiO, MnO 2 , MoO 3 , CeO 2 , Co 3 O 4 , CuO and TiO 2 10, [16][17][18][19] . Among such transition metal oxides, NiO nanoparticles can improve the oxidation kinetics and reduce the poisoning of Pd/C, due to the excellent capacity to transport surface lattice oxygen and OH ads 10,20,21 . However, general routes to synthesize NiO nanoparticles are usually on the surface of carbon materials, which lead to heterogeneous dispersion and even result in the surface shed off. Thus, it is urgent to choose a template to arrange the growth of transition metal oxides. Recently, porous carbon materials synthesized by directly annealing coordination compounds especially metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) possess ultrahigh surface area and periodic network of highly ordered three-dimensional framework structure, which are highly desirable as stable supports to load precious metals [22][23][24][25] .Here, we used the vanillic thiosemicarbazone ligand (L = C 9 H 10 N 3 O 2 S) including N and S heteroatoms and its coordination compound NiL 2 as precursors to obtain porous carbon materials containing nickel, nitrogen and
