Molecular metal–Nx centres in porous carbon for electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution

Nature Communications - Tập 6 Số 1
Hai‐Wei Liang1, Sebastian Brüller1, Renhao Dong⧫1, Jian Zhang2, Xinliang Feng2, Kläus Müllen1
1Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research, Ackermannweg 10, Mainz, 55128, Germany
2Department of Chemistry and Food Chemistry & Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed), Technische Universität Dresden, Mommsenstrasse 4, Dresden, 01062, Germany

Tóm tắt

Abstract

Replacement of precious platinum with efficient and low-cost catalysts for electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution at low overpotentials holds tremendous promise for clean energy devices. Here we report a novel type of robust cobalt–nitrogen/carbon catalyst for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) that is prepared by the pyrolysis of cobalt–N4 macrocycles or cobalt/o-phenylenediamine composites and using silica colloids as a hard template. We identify the well-dispersed molecular CoNx sites on the carbon support as the active sites responsible for the HER. The CoNx/C catalyst exhibits extremely high turnover frequencies per cobalt site in acids, for example, 0.39 and 6.5 s−1 at an overpotential of 100 and 200 mV, respectively, which are higher than those reported for other scalable non-precious metal HER catalysts. Our results suggest the great promise of developing new families of non-precious metal HER catalysts based on the controlled conversion of homogeneous metal complexes into solid-state carbon catalysts via economically scalable protocols.

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Tập 6 Số 1

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