Abstract
There is an urgent need to develop metal-free, low cost, durable, and highly efficient catalysts for industrially important oxygen evolution reactions. Inspired by natural geodes, unique melamine nanogeodes are successfully synthesized using hydrothermal process. Sulfur-modified graphitic carbon nitride (S-modified g-CN x) electrocatalysts are obtained by annealing these melamine nanogeodes in situ with sulfur. The sulfur modification in the g-CN x structure leads to excellent oxygen evolution reaction activity by lowering the overpotential. Compared with the previously reported nonmetallic systems and well-established metallic catalysts, the S-modified g-CN x nanostructures show superior performance, requiring a lower overpotential (290 mV) to achieve a current density of 10 mA cm−2 and a Tafel slope of 120 mV dec−1 with long-term durability of 91.2% retention for 18 h. These inexpensive, environmentally friendly, and easy-to-synthesize catalysts with extraordinary performance will have a high impact in the field of oxygen evolution reaction electrocatalysis.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 1603893 |
Journal | Small |
Volume | 13 |
Issue number | 17 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2017 May 3 |
Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:V.S.K. and U.S. contributed equally to this work. The authors acknowledge financial support from the Institute for Basic Science in the Republic of Korea (IBS-R006-D1) (T.H.), the Global Frontier R&D Program on Center for Multiscale Energy System (2011-0031571) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future, Korea through the Research Institute of Advanced Materials (RIAM) and by KIST Institutional Program (0543-20160004) (K.T.N.), the financial support by the NRF through the SRC Center for Topological Matter (No. 2011-0030787), the experiments at PLS were supported in part by MSIP and POSTECH (C.-C.H.), and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MSIP) (No. 2015R1A2A2A01006992) (Z.L.).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
Keywords
- electrocatalysis
- graphitic carbon nitride
- nanostructures
- oxygen evolution reaction
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Chemistry
- General Materials Science
- Biotechnology
- Biomaterials