Chinese Journal of Catalysis ›› 2022, Vol. 43 ›› Issue (11): 2906-2912.DOI: 10.1016/S1872-2067(21)63979-7

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Two-in-one strategy to construct bifunctional oxygen electrocatalysts for rechargeable Zn-air battery

Huibing Liu, Rixin Xie, Ziqiang Niu, Qiaohuan Jia, Liu Yang*(), Shitao Wang, Dapeng Cao#()   

  1. State Key Laboratory of Organic-Inorganic Composites, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China
  • Received:2022-03-26 Accepted:2022-05-16 Online:2022-11-18 Published:2022-10-20
  • Contact: Liu Yang, Dapeng Cao
  • About author: Contributed equally to this work.
  • Supported by:
    National Key Research and Development Project(2019YFA0210300);Outstanding Talent Fund from Beijing University of Chemical Technology and China National Postdoctoral Program of Innovative Talents(BX20200041)

Abstract:

Integrating two different catalytic active sites into one composite is a useful 2-in-1 strategy for designing high-efficient bifunctional catalysts, which can easily tailor the activity of each reaction. Hence, we adopt the 2-in-1 strategy to design the metal oxyhydroxide supported on N-doped porous carbons (PA-CoFe@NPC) as the oxygen bifunctional catalyst, where NPC provides the activity for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) while the metal oxyhydroxide is responsible for oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Results demonstrate that the PA-CoFe@NPC indeed exhibits both super ORR and OER activities. Impressively, using bifunctional PA-CoFe@NPC as the oxygen electrode, the resulting Zn-air battery exhibits outstanding charge and discharge performance with the peak power density of 156.3 mW cm‒2, and also exhibits a long-term cycle stability with continuous cyclic charge and discharge of 170 hours that is obviously better than the 20% Pt/C+IrO2 based one. The 2-in-1 strategy in this work can be efficiently extended to design other bi- or multi-functional electrocatalysts.

Key words: Two-in-one strategy, Bifunctional catalyst, Oxygen reduction, Oxygen evolution, Zn-air battery