Tuesday, 15 October 2019
Grand Ballroom (The Hilton Atlanta)
Recently, the environmental problems caused by excess use of fossil fuels triggered intense research for efficient, inexpensive, and harmless energy conversion and storage devices such as fuel cells and rechargeable metal air batteries. In these applications, the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) are a key electrochemical process for commercialization. Also, developing non-noble metal-based electrocatalysts with high electrochemical performance is very important in economic point of view. To address these issues, electrocatalysts based on nanocarbon frameworks such as metal organic frameworks (MOFs) and zeolitic imidazolate framework (ZIF) have been widely investigated as promising alternatives to Pt-based catalysts. In this work, we prepared bi-metallic ZIFs by coprecipitation of zinc and cobalt ions in the presence of 2-methylimidazole, followed by one-step sulfidation and carbonization to synthesize zinc cobalt sulfides supported on N, S co-doped porous carbon. The as-synthesized catalyst maintained inherent dodecahedral particle shape of ZIF. Furthermore, it exhibits outstanding ORR onset-potential (0.96 V vs. RHE) and half-wave potential (0.83 V vs. RHE), which is comparable to commercial Pt/C catalyst in alkaline electrolyte. Such outstanding electrochemical properties are mainly ascribed to the synergistic effect of the chemical composition, high electrochemical active surface area, and abundant active sites of the dodecahedral structure. These findings suggest that the transition metal sulfides on N, S co-doped porous carbon can be a promising alternative for the next generation of energy storage and conversion technologies.
