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ZnO@zeolitic imidazolate frameworks derived porous hybrid hollow carbon shell as an efficient electrocatalyst for oxygen reduction

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Abstract

Designing reasonable MOFs-derived carbon materials to further effectively improve the catalytic activity toward ORR in the practical application of fuel cells is very necessary but remains a great challenge. Herein, a new facile yet robust strategy, self-sacrifice template approach combined with a variety of MOFs, to achieve core–shell ZnO@zeolitic imidazolate frameworks precursor (ZnO@ZIF-8@ZIF-67) is developed. Subsequently, the porous hybrid hollow carbon shell (Zn/Co-NC) can be obtained by calcinating the precursor. Impressively, the Zn/Co-NC-800 prepared by pyrolysis at 800 °C manifests excellent ORR performances with a positive onset potential of 1.03 V (vs. reversible hydrogen electrode) (vs. RHE), a more positive half-wave potential at 0.856 V (vs. RHE, a positive shift of 28 mV compared with the Pt/C) and 4-electron pathway (n = 3.80). Also, it performs higher long-term stability (only a 7.9% decay of initial current density after 20000 s) and better methanol tolerance in comparison with the traditional Pt/C in alkaline media. In our current work, the synthesis strategy of the self-sacrificing template combined with ZIFs opens up a new route for the preparation of highly efficient non-precious metal electrocatalysts for ORR.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the Tianjin Science and Technology Committee (No. 19YFZCSF00830) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NO. 21776214).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Catalysis Science and Technology and Tianjin Key Laboratory of Applied Catalysis Science & Technology, School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300350, China

    Fuhao Fang, Mengquan Guo, Xiangxiang Li & Lihong Zhang

  2. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China

    Zhengyu Wu, Dong Zheng, Yadan Wei, Xianhua Liu, Yindong Tong, Xu Dong & Yiren Lu

  3. China Automotive Technology and Research Center Co., Ltd, Automotive Engineering Research Institute, Tianjin, 300300, China

    Zhenguo Li

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  1. Fuhao Fang
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Contributions

FF contributed to conceptualization, methodology, investigation, data curation, writing—original draft. ZW contributed to visualization, writing—editing, formal analysis. DZ contributed to formal analysis. MG contributed to formal analysis. XL contributed to formal analysis. ZL contributed to formal analysis. YW contributed to formal analysis. XL contributed to formal analysis. YT contributed to formal analysis. XD contributed to formal analysis. YL contributed to conceptualization, methodology, resources, writing—review and editing, funding acquisition, project administration, supervision. LZ contributed to conceptualization, methodology, resources, writing—review and editing, funding acquisition, project administration, supervision.

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Correspondence to Yiren Lu or Lihong Zhang.

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Fang, F., Wu, Z., Zheng, D. et al. ZnO@zeolitic imidazolate frameworks derived porous hybrid hollow carbon shell as an efficient electrocatalyst for oxygen reduction. J Mater Sci 56, 14989–15003 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-021-06167-8

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