J. Mater. Sci. Technol. ›› 2021, Vol. 65: 1-6.DOI: 10.1016/j.jmst.2020.04.065

• Research Article •     Next Articles

NiPS3 quantum sheets modified nitrogen-doped mesoporous carbon with boosted bifunctional oxygen electrocatalytic performance

Kai Huanga, Yuyang Xua, Yanpeng Songb,c, Ruyue Wanga,d, Hehe Weid, Yuanzheng Longd, Ming Leia,*(), Haolin Tange,*(), Jiangang Guoc,*(), Hui Wud,*()   

  1. aState Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications & School of Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
    bBeijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
    cUniversity of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
    dState Key Laboratory of New Ceramics and Fine Processing, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
    eState Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China
  • Received:2020-03-17 Revised:2020-04-18 Accepted:2020-04-25 Published:2021-02-28 Online:2021-03-15
  • Contact: Ming Lei,Haolin Tang,Jiangang Guo,Hui Wu
  • About author:huiwu@tsinghua.edu.cn (H. Wu).
    jgguo@iphy.ac.cn (J. Guo),
    thln@whut.edu.cn (H. Tang),
    * E-mail addresses: mlei@bupt.edu.cn (M. Lei),
    First author contact:

    1These authors contributed equally.

Abstract:

Electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reactions (ORR) and oxygen evolution reactions (OER) are highly crucial and challenging toward the energy storage and conversion technologies such as fuel cells, metal-air batteries and water electrolysis. To replace noble-metal based catalysts and boost catalytic performance of carbon-based materials, we initially develop the nickel, phosphorus, sulfur and nitrogen co-modified mesoporous carbon (NiPS3@NMC) as a bifunctional oxygen electrocatalyst. The performance for ORR (half-wave potential at 0.90 V) and OER (10 mA cm-2 at 1.48 V) surpasses those of Pt/C coupled with IrO2 catalysts and most of the non-precious metal based bifunctional electrocatalysts reported in related literature. Moreover, the electrochemical durability is also confirmed by accelerated durability tests (ADTs) and long-term chronoamperometry (CA) tests. We demonstrated that the interfacial effect between NiPS3 quantum sheets (QSs) and NMC substrates by thermal activation contributed to the enhanced oxygen electrode bifunctionality with more active sites, due to the electrons-donating from nickel, phosphorus and sulfur elements and relatively enriched pyridinic type N. Such excellent overall performance highlights the potential application of NiPS3 QSs and NMC composites as the materials on energy conversion and storage.

Key words: NiPS3 quantum sheets, N-doped mesoporous carbon, Bifunctional oxygen electrocatalysts, Liquid exfoliation, Thermal annealing