Nitrogen Precursor Effects in Iron-Nitrogen-Carbon Oxygen Reduction Catalysts

Activity, Performance, and Durability for the Reduction of Oxygen in PEM Fuel Cells, of Fe/N/C Electrocatalysts Obtained from the Pyrolysis of Metal-Organic-Framework and Iron Porphyrin Precursors

“…These catalysts have indeed shown to be highly active and performing at the beginning of their lives, but their durability still needs to be greatly improved in order to become serious contenders to Pt [4,5] The literature reporting the durability of pyrolyzed Fe-or/and Co/N/C catalysts at the cathode of PEM fuel cells is rather scarce but increased in the recent years. A minority of durability experiments were performed at constant current in pure H 2 /O 2 [6][7][8][9], or in H 2 /Air [10,11], while the majority of stability fuel cell tests were obtained at constant potential either: (i) in pure H 2 /O 2 at 0.4 V [12][13][14][15][16][17], or at 0.5 V [4,5,[18][19][20][21][22], or (ii) in H 2 /Air at 0.4 V [4,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30], or at 0.5 V [5,18,[31][32][33], or at 0.6 V [30,34,35]. All these stability tests were performed for various durations at different fuel cell temperatures (mostly 80 C), gas humidification, feeding rates and backpressures.…”

Recent Progress on Fe/N/C Electrocatalysts for the Oxygen Reduction Reaction in Fuel Cells

“…In the last five years, Fe-based materials are mainly prepared by the simple pyrolysis of transition metal salt (FeCl3 [34,36,39,41,47,[73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80], Fe(NO3)3 [81][82][83][84], FeAc [24,74,[85][86][87][88], and FeC2O4 [42]), carbon support, and nitrogen-rich small molecule [34,36,78,79,85,[87][88][89] or polymeric compound [7,[39][40][41]90]. An important breakthrough was made by Zelenay et al [7] who successfully synthesized Fe/N/C catalysts (PANI-Fe-C) via heat-treatment of polyaniline (PANI), FeCl3 and carbon black (Ketjenblack EC-300J).…”

3,5-Diamino-1,2,4-triazole as a Nitrogen precursor to synthesize highly efficient Co-N/C non-precious metal bifunctional catalyst for oxygen reduction reaction and oxygen evolution reaction

“…Nallathambi et al [31] demonstrated that the accessible active site density increased with increasing the N/C ratio of the Nitrogen precursor, which could lead to the active M-N/C catalysts. They found that the most active catalyst has a N/C ratio of 2 [31].…”

“…Nallathambi et al [31] demonstrated that the accessible active site density increased with increasing the N/C ratio of the Nitrogen precursor, which could lead to the active M-N/C catalysts. They found that the most active catalyst has a N/C ratio of 2 [31]. Therefore, in order to obtain more efficient bifunctional M-N/C catalysts, several different types of Nitrogen precursors have been used as Nitrogen sources, such as macrocycles [32,33], conductive polymers [13,16] and small molecules [12,14,17].…”