An 'active site anchoring' strategy for the preparation of PBO fiber derived carbon catalyst towards an efficient oxygen reduction reaction and zinc-air batteries

Weihua Zhong; Zuoxu Xiao; Yunjun Luo; Dianbo Zhang; Xiangdong Chen; Jinwang Bai

doi:10.1039/d3ra07694f

An 'active site anchoring' strategy for the preparation of PBO fiber derived carbon catalyst towards an efficient oxygen reduction reaction and zinc-air batteries

RSC Adv. 2023 Dec 14;13(51):36424-36429. doi: 10.1039/d3ra07694f. eCollection 2023 Dec 8.

Authors

Weihua Zhong^{1

2}, Zuoxu Xiao², Yunjun Luo¹, Dianbo Zhang², Xiangdong Chen², Jinwang Bai²

Affiliations

¹ School of Materials Science & Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology 100081 Beijing China yjluo@bit.edu.cn.
² Shandong Institute of Nonmetallic Materials Jinan 250031 Shandong China.

Abstract

In order to promote the wide application of clean energy-fuel cells, it is urgent to develop transition metal-based high-efficiency oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) catalytic materials with a low cost and available rich raw material resources to replace the currently used precious metal platinum-based catalytic materials. Herein, a novel 'active-site-anchoring' strategy was developed to synthesize highly-activated carbon-based ORR catalysts. Firstly, poly(p-phenylene benzobisoxazole) (PBO) fiber with a stable chemical structure was selected as the main precursor, and iron was complexed on its surface, and then poly-dopamine (PDA) was coated on the surface of PBO-Fe to form a PBO-Fe-PDA composite structure. Therefore, carbon-based catalyst PBO-Fe-PDA-900 with abundant Fe₂O₃ active sites was prepared by anchoring iron sites by PDA after pyrolysis. As a result, the PBO-Fe-PDA-900 catalyst displayed a 30 mV higher half-wave potential (0.86 V) than that of a commercial Pt/C electrocatalyst. Finally, PBO-Fe-PDA-900 was used as a cathode material for zinc-air batteries, showing a high peak power density superior to Pt/C. This work offers new prospects for the design of efficient, non-precious metal-based materials in zinc-air batteries.