Architecting a Mesoporous N-Doped Graphitic Carbon Framework Encapsulating CoTe2 as an Efficient Oxygen Evolution Electrocatalyst

Ming Liu; Xiaoqing Lu; Chen Guo; Zhaojie Wang; Yanpeng Li; Yan Lin; Yan Zhou; Shutao Wang; Jun Zhang

doi:10.1021/acsami.7b09897

Architecting a Mesoporous N-Doped Graphitic Carbon Framework Encapsulating CoTe₂ as an Efficient Oxygen Evolution Electrocatalyst

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2017 Oct 18;9(41):36146-36153. doi: 10.1021/acsami.7b09897. Epub 2017 Oct 4.

Authors

Ming Liu¹, Xiaoqing Lu¹, Chen Guo¹, Zhaojie Wang¹, Yanpeng Li¹, Yan Lin¹, Yan Zhou¹, Shutao Wang¹, Jun Zhang¹

Affiliation

¹ College of Chemical Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Heavy Oil Processing and ‡College of Science, China University of Petroleum , Qingdao 266580, P. R. China.

PMID: 28926695
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.7b09897

Abstract

To improve the efficiency of cobalt-based catalysts for water electrolysis, tremendous efforts have been dedicated to tuning the composition, morphology, size, and structure of the materials. We report here a facile preparation of orthorhombic CoTe₂ nanocrystals embedded in an N-doped graphitic carbon matrix to form a 3D architecture with a size of ∼500 nm and abundant mesopores of ∼4 nm for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The hybrid electrocatalyst delivers a small overpotential of 300 mV at 10 mA cm^-2, which is much lower than that for pristine CoTe₂ powder. After cycling for 2000 cycles or driving continual OER for 20 h, only a slight loss is observed. The mesoporous 3D architecture and the strong interaction between N-doped graphitic carbon and CoTe₂ are responsible for the enhancement of the electrocatalytic performance.

Keywords: N-doped graphitic carbon; cobalt telluride; mesoporous architecture; metal−organic framework; oxygen evolution reaction.