How to design and synthesize of efficient and earth-abundant catalysts for a wide variety of electrochemical energy storage and conversion reactions is a great challenge. Guided by the advantage of component manipulation, morphology control, and structure engineering, advanced MOF-based materials have exhibited remarkable activity, selectivity, and stability for various energy-conversion processes, manifesting great potential for replacing precious-metal-based catalysts in next-generation energy devices. We have studied MOF based materials (Pd@HKUST-1) for hydrogen storage¹. Recently, we have synthesized a porous carbon nanomaterial loaded with cobalt nanoparticles (Co@NC-x/y) derived from pyrolysis of a Co/Zn bimetallic zeolitic imidazolite framework, which exhibits incredibly high activity as bifunctional oxygen catalysts². For instance, the optimal catalyst of Co@NC-3/1 has the superb ORR activity with onset potential of ~1.15 V and half-wave potential of ~0.93 V. Moreover, its OER activity is better than commercial IrO₂ and it also presents a long-term stability for 2000 circles and a Tafel slope of 85 mV dec^-1.

References

[1] Li G., Kobayashi H., Taylor J. M., Ikeda R., Kubota Y., Kato K., Takata M., Yamamoto T., Toh S., Matsumura S., Kitagawa H. *, Nature Mater., 13, 802 (2014).

[2] Li Y., Jia B., Fan Y., Zhu K., Li G. *, Su C.-Y. *, Adv. Energy Mater., 201702048 (2017).