Publication date: 6th November 2020
Fuel cells are the upcoming alternative for the combustion engine. Using hydrogen and oxygen to produce water and electricity, they promise higher efficiencies and no pollution. These green electrochemical reactions, hydrogen oxidation reaction and oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) are excellently catalyzed by noble metals. However, these elements are costly and scarce, limiting the use of fuel cells to only novelty projects. For large scale application, affordable and abundant electrocatalysts are a must.
As an alternative, we and others developed N-doped carbons, promising catalysts at a fraction of the price of noble metals and abundant enough to use in every imaginable application.[1,2] Inherently, N-doped carbons consist of defect rich disordered amorphous domains and ordered graphitic domains, both active in ORR. But which domain is more active for ORR, amorphous or graphitic? An important question, as decreasing inactive material and thus decreasing electrode area is the difference between hydrogen fuel cells fitting only Hummers or also fitting Smarts.
To answer the question, we changed the ratios between these phases in our well characterized carbon. Using this method, we got three valuable insights. First, as promised we showed which phase N-doped carbon phase is more ORR active. But we did not stop there. We also aimed to understand the post-synthesis modifications and how these affected the N-doped carbon morphology and surface structure. Lastly, we showed that, just like numbers without context, synthesis/modifications without understanding provide wrong conclusions.
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