Transition Metal (Fe, Co, Ni) Nanoparticles on Selective Amino-N-Doped Carbon as High-Performance Oxygen Reduction Reaction Electrocatalyst

SeongHee Kim; Shuhei Kato; Takahiro Ishizaki; Oi Lun Li; Jun Kang

doi:10.3390/nano9050742

Transition Metal (Fe, Co, Ni) Nanoparticles on Selective Amino-N-Doped Carbon as High-Performance Oxygen Reduction Reaction Electrocatalyst

Nanomaterials (Basel). 2019 May 14;9(5):742. doi: 10.3390/nano9050742.

Authors

SeongHee Kim¹, Shuhei Kato², Takahiro Ishizaki³, Oi Lun Li⁴, Jun Kang⁵

Affiliations

¹ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Pusan National University, Busan 46241, Korea. ksh08280@naver.com.
² Department of Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo 135-8548, Japan. mb18008@shibaura-it.ac.jp.
³ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo 135-8548, Japan. ishizaki@shibaura-it.ac.jp.
⁴ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Pusan National University, Busan 46241, Korea. helenali@pusan.ac.kr.
⁵ Division of Marine Engineering, Korea Maritime and Ocean University, Busan 606-791, Korea. junkang@kmou.ac.kr.

Abstract

Metal-air batteries are attracting increasing attention as a superior renewable energy conversion device due to their high performance and strong potential. However, the high cost and low stability of the current Pt catalyst is the main obstacle preventing wide industrial application. In this work, we applied a plasma process to fabricate aniline and a transition metals electrode (Fe, Co, Ni) as the carbon-nitrogen and the metal nanoparticle (NP) precursors, respectively, for selective metal/amino-N-doped carbon catalysts. All three as-synthesized catalysts exhibited dominant amino-N as the major C-N bonding state. In electrochemical testing, Co/amino-N-doped carbon showed positive E_1/2 potential (0.83 V vs. Reversible Hydrogen Electrode (RHE)). In addition, the calculated electron transfer number (n) of Co/amino-N-doped carbon at 0.5 V vs. RHE was 3.81, which was only slightly less than that of commercial Pt/C (3.97). This superior performance of transition metal/amino-N-doped carbon promotes it as an economical oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) electrocatalyst to replace expensive Pt/C in metal-air batteries.

Keywords: metal-nitrogen-hybrid catalyst; nitrogen-doped carbon; oxygen reduction reaction; selective amino-N doping; transitional metal nanoparticles.