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Construction of ultra-stable NiFe armored catalyst for liquid and flexible quasi-solid-state rechargeable Zn-air batteries

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Abstract

The commercial application of non-precious metal-based electrocatalysts is not only limited by the intrinsic activity of the catalysts, but also the stability of the catalysts is extremely important. Herein, we fabricated an ultra-stable NiFe armored catalyst (Ar-NiFe/NC) by a simple secondary pyrolysis strategy. The as-obtained Ar-NiFe/NC electrocatalyst exhibits an excellent bifunctional oxygen electrocatalytic performance with an activity indicator ΔE of 0.74 V vs. reversible hydrogen electrode (RHE). More importantly, the Ar-NiFe/NC electrocatalyst also shows a remarkable operational and storage stability. After accelerated durability test (ADT) cycles, no obvious degradation of oxygen electrocatalytic performance could be observed. In addition, the Ar-NiFe/NC electrocatalyst still exhibits an unbated oxygen electrocatalytic performance comparable to fresh catalysts after three months of air-exposed storage. The assembled liquid and flexible quasi-solid-state rechargeable Zn—air batteries with the Ar-NiFe/NC electrocatalyst exhibit impressive performance. The liquid rechargeable Zn—air batteries possess a high open-circuit voltage (OCV) of 1.43 V and a salient peak power density of 146.40 mW·cm−2, while the flexible quasi-solid-state rechargeable Zn—air batteries also exhibit an excellent OCV of 1.60 V and an exciting peak power density of 41.99 mW·cm−2.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 22102132), the Funds for Basic Scientific Research in Central Universities and the Youth Project of the Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province, China (No. 2021JQ-087), Ningbo Natural Science Foundation (No. 2021J053), and the open research fund of Key Laboratory for Organic Electronics and Information Displays.

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  1. Hanqin Sun, Meiqi Zhao, and Chao Ma contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Frontiers Science Center for Flexible Electronics, Xi’an Institute of Flexible Electronics (IFE) and Xi’an Institute of Biomedical Materials & Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, China

    Hanqin Sun, Meiqi Zhao, Wen Chen & Yunhu Han

  2. Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Chao Ma

  3. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, China

    Yong Yang

  4. State Key Laboratory of Structural Chemistry, Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fuzhou, 350002, China

    Yunhu Han

  5. Key Laboratory for Organic Electronics and Information Displays & Institute of Advanced Materials (IAM), Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Yunhu Han

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  1. Hanqin Sun
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Correspondence to Yong Yang or Yunhu Han.

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Construction of ultra-stable NiFe armored catalyst for liquid and flexible quasi-solid-state rechargeable Zn-air batteries

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Sun, H., Zhao, M., Ma, C. et al. Construction of ultra-stable NiFe armored catalyst for liquid and flexible quasi-solid-state rechargeable Zn-air batteries. Nano Res. 16, 4980–4986 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-5197-2

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