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Mn, N co-doped Co nanoparticles/porous carbon as air cathode for highly efficient rechargeable Zn-air batteries

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Abstract

Oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) are generally catalyzed by precious metals (Pt) and metal oxides (IrO2) which still have many shortages including expensive price, poor selectivity and undesirable stability. In this work, we report a Mn0-doped CoNx on N-doped porous carbon (Mn-CoNx/N-PC) composite from carbonizing metal-organic framework (MOF) derivative as the dual-functional catalyst to boost both the ORR and OER performances. Owing to the strong coordination effect between nitrogen and metal elements, the introduction of N can obviously improve the content of Co-N-C active sites for ORR. Meanwhile, the Mn-doping significantly regulates the electronic structure of the Co element and increases the content of Co0 which provide efficient OER active sites. Mn-CoNx/N-PC catalyst delivers super dual-functional activity with a half-wave potential of 0.85 V, better than the 20% Pt/C catalyst (0.82 V). When used in Zn-air batteries for testing, Mn-CoNx/N-PC electrocatalyst shows a high power density (145 mW·cm−2) and good cycle performance.

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Acknowledgments

This work was financially supported by the Gansu Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 17JR5RA198), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Nos. lzujbky-2018-119, lzujbky-2018-ct08, and lzujbky-2019-it23), Key Areas Scientific and Technological Research Projects in Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (No. 2018AB004), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11975114), Cooperation project of Gansu Academy of Sciences(No. 2020HZ-2), the fund of State Key Laboratory of Advanced Processing and Recycling of Non-ferrous Metals (No. SKLAB02019001) and Cooperation project of Gansu Academy of Sciences (No. 2020HZ-2).

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  1. Hanzhen Zheng and Fei Ma contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National & Local Joint Engineering Laboratory for Optical Conversion Materials and Technology, School of Physical Science and Technology, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, China

    Hanzhen Zheng, Fei Ma, Hongcen Yang, Xiaogang Wu, Rui Wang, Dali Jia, Zhixia Wang, Niandi Lu & Shanglong Peng

  2. State Key Laboratory of Advanced Processing and Recycling of Non-ferrous Metals, School of Material Science and Engineering, Lanzhou University of Technology, Lanzhou, 730050, China

    Fen Ran

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  1. Hanzhen Zheng
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Zheng, H., Ma, F., Yang, H. et al. Mn, N co-doped Co nanoparticles/porous carbon as air cathode for highly efficient rechargeable Zn-air batteries. Nano Res. 15, 1942–1948 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-021-3837-6

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