Heteroatom‐Doped Carbon Materials for Electrocatalysis

Abstract

Fuel cells, water electrolyzers, and metal-air batteries are important energy systems that have started to play some roles in our renewable energy landscapes. However, despite much research works carried out on them, they have not yet found large-scale applications, mainly due to the unavailability of sustainable catalysts that can catalyze the reactions employed in them. Currently, noble metal-based materials are the ones that are commonly used as catalysts in most commercial fuel cells, electrolyzers, and metal-air batteries. Hence, there has been considerable research efforts worldwide to find alternative noble metal-free and metal-free catalysts composed of inexpensive, earth-abundant elements for use in the catalytic reactions employed in these energy systems. In this concept paper, a brief introduction on catalysis in renewable energy systems, followed by the recent efforts to develop sustainable, heteroatom-doped carbon and non-noble metal-based electrocatalysts, the challenges to unravel their structure-catalytic activity relationships, and the authors' perspectives on these topics and materials, are discussed.

Defective N/S‐Codoped 3D Cheese‐Like Porous Carbon Nanomaterial toward Efficient Oxygen Reduction and Zn–Air Batteries

“…Compared to single N atom doping, the synergistic effect between dual heteroatom dopants can effectively modulate electronic properties and surface polarities of carbon matrix, promoting the ORR activity. [5a,6] However, such materials are usually prepared using heteroatom‐containing chemical reagents, polymers, various fossil‐based materials, and other miscellaneous materials as precursors . The negative aspects of synthetic method using these sources are high cost, long time consumption, low productivity, toxic waste, and complex route, which may bring about environmental pollution and high energy consumption.…”

Direct Semiconductor Laser Writing of Few‐Layer Graphene Polyhedra Networks for Flexible Solid‐State Supercapacitor

“…Therefore, the versatile surface properties of the final carbonaceous materials should be minted during the photothermal reaction and ultrafast cooling. Thanks to the possible electrocatalysis of nitrogen and oxygen codoped carbon lattice electrodes for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in acid and alkaline medium, the neutral LiCl/poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) polymer gel electrolyte was utilized in this work with the merits of low requirement for packaging (Noncorrosive), easy integrating with wearable, implant power sources and serving as an elastic coating to enhance the mechanical strength . Furthermore, the combination of Faradaic intercalation and non‐Faradaic absorption of the Li‐ions at electrodes allows our devices to have high energy density and respectable power density, cycling stability at the same time.…”

Melamine‐Induced N,S‐Codoped Hierarchically Porous Carbon Nanosheets for Enhanced Electrocatalytic Oxygen Reduction

“…On the one hand, the intentional introduction of non‐metal elements (N, F, P, S, etc ) into carbon materials can tailor their chemical and electronic properties, create the active sites and boost the O 2 adsorption, thus boosting the reduction reactions . Noticeably, recent researches have proved that doping two types of dopants into carbon materials can induce a synergistic effect based on the charge and spin density changes at the various sites of co‐doped materials, which would enhance reaction kinetics, exhibiting superior performance compared with single‐doped carbon catalysts . On the other hand, the advisable engineering of nanostructures (e. g. nanosheets, nanotubes, and nanospheres) with hierarchical porosity also provides additional structural advantages, for instance, the large specific surface area to well‐exposed active sites, and sophisticated pore channels to the improved mass and electron transport, which is highly conducive to enhancing catalytic activities of carbon materials .…”