Premium
Thermal Sugar Bubbling Preparation of N‐Doped Porous Carbon for High‐Performance Solid‐State Zn‐Air Batteries
Author(s) -
Chen Si,
Chen Song,
Zhang Jintao
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
batteries and supercaps
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2566-6223
DOI - 10.1002/batt.201800105
Subject(s) - bifunctional , electrocatalyst , chemical engineering , oxygen evolution , materials science , carbon fibers , catalysis , battery (electricity) , inorganic chemistry , chemistry , electrode , electrochemistry , composite material , organic chemistry , composite number , power (physics) , physics , quantum mechanics , engineering
The rational design of metal‐free carbon‐based bifunctional electrocatalysts for lowering the energy barrier of oxygen reactions in metal‐air batteries has a propelling effect on improving their overall performance. Herein, we reported the preparation of N‐doped porous carbon materials with a large specific surface area of over 1900 m 2 g −1 via thermal bubbling of glucose in the presence of cyanuric acid and ammonia chloride. When used as electrocatalysts, the porous carbon exhibited excellent bifunctional electrocatalytic activities for both, the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The potential gap (Δ E = E OER j=10 ‐ E ORR 1/2 ) between two reactions at the NPC‐1000 catalyst is 0.72 V, which is even lower than that of the commercial electrocatalyst (e. g., Pt+RuO 2 , ∼0.80 V). The good bifunctional catalytic activities render the fabrication of high‐performance rechargeable Zn‐air batteries. Specifically, the flexible all‐solid‐state Zn‐air battery assembled with NPC‐1000 as the air cathode exhibited good charge‐discharge stability and the voltage efficiency could be maintained about 58.6 % even after cycling for 50 h. Furthermore, no obvious voltage decay was observed under various bending, showing the good mechanical flexibility.