Atomic Ni and Cu co-anchored 3D nanoporous graphene as an efficient oxygen reduction electrocatalyst for zinc-air batteries

Yongtai Cheng; Haofei Wu; Jiuhui Han; Siying Zhong; Senhe Huang; Shufen Chu; Shuangxi Song; Kolan Madhav Reddy; Xiaodong Wang; Shaoyi Wu; Xiaodong Zhuang; Isaac Johnson; Pan Liu; Mingwei Chen

doi:10.1039/d1nr01612a

Atomic Ni and Cu co-anchored 3D nanoporous graphene as an efficient oxygen reduction electrocatalyst for zinc-air batteries

Nanoscale. 2021 Jun 24;13(24):10862-10870. doi: 10.1039/d1nr01612a.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Shanghai Key Laboratory of Advanced High-temperature Materials and Precision Forming, State Key Laboratory of Metal Matrix Composites, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, P. R. China. panliu@sjtu.edu.cn.
² Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences (FRIS), Tohoku University, Sendai 980-8577, Japan and WPI Advanced Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-8577, Japan.
³ School of Physics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 611731, P. R. China.
⁴ The meso-Entropy Matter Lab, State Key Laboratory of Metal Matrix Composites, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Electrical Insulation and Thermal Ageing, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, P. R. China.
⁵ WPI Advanced Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-8577, Japan and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA. mwchen@jhu.edu.
⁶ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA. mwchen@jhu.edu.

PMID: 34114571
DOI: 10.1039/d1nr01612a

Abstract

Highly active, cost-effective and durable electrocatalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) are critically important for renewable energy conversion and storage. Here we report a 3D bicontinuous nitrogen doped nanoporous graphene electrocatalyst co-anchoring with atomically dispersed nickel and copper atoms ((Ni,Cu)-NG) as a highly active single-atom ORR catalyst, fabricated by the combination of chemical vapor deposition and high temperature gas transportation. The resultant (Ni,Cu)-NG exhibits an exceptional ORR activity in alkaline electrolytes, comparable to the Pt-based benchmarks, from the synergistic effect of the CuNx and NiNx complexes. Endowed with high catalytic activity and outstanding durability under harsh electrochemical environments, rechargeable zinc-air batteries using (Ni,Cu)-NG as the cathodes show excellent energy efficiency (voltage gap of 0.74 V), large power density (150.6 mW cm-2 at 250 mA cm-2) and high cycling stability (>500 discharge-charge cycles at 10 mA cm-2). This study may pave an efficient avenue for designing highly durable single-atom ORR catalysts for metal-air batteries.