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

Liang HW, Brueller S, Dong R, Zhang J, Feng X, Muellen K (2015)

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2015

Journal

Nature Communications Nature Publishing Group: Nature Communications

Book Volume: 6

Article Number: 7992

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8992

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-N 4 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 6.5s^-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.

Involved external institutions

Max-Planck-Institut für Polymerforschung (MPI-P) / Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research

Germany (DE) Technische Universität Dresden

Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Liang, H.-W., Brueller, S., Dong, R., Zhang, J., Feng, X., & Muellen, K. (2015). Molecular metal-Nx centres in porous carbon for electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution. Nature Communications, 6. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms8992

MLA:

Liang, Hai-Wei, et al. "Molecular metal-Nx centres in porous carbon for electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution." Nature Communications 6 (2015).

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