Nitrogen-Doped Carbon Cubosomes as an Efficient Electrocatalyst with High Accessibility of Internal Active Sites
Yi Pan, Yupeng Xin, Yinghua Li, Zhi Xu, Chen Tang, Xin Liu, Yucheng Yin, Jiacheng Zhang, Fugui Xu, Chen Li, Yiyong Mai
Abstract
Porous carbon particles (PCPs) present considerable potential for applications across a wide range of fields, particularly within the realms of energy and catalysis. The control of their overall morphologies and pore structures has remained a big challenge. Here, using metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) as the precursor and polymer cubosomes (PCs) as the template, nitrogen-doped carbon cubosomes (SP-NCs) with a single primitive bicontinuous architecture are prepared. SP-NCs inherit the high porosity of MOFs, generating a high specific surface area of 825 m 2 g –1 and uniformly distributed active sites with a 5.9 at % nitrogen content. Thanks to the presence of three-dimensional continuous mesochannels that enable much higher accessibility of internal active sites over those of their porous counterparts’ lack of continuous channels, SP-NCs exhibit superior electrocatalytic performance for oxygen reduction reaction with a half-wave potential of 0.87 V, situating them in the leading level of the reported carbon electrocatalysts. Serving as an air cathode catalyst of the Zn–air battery, SP-NCs exhibit excellent performance, outperforming the commercial Pt/C catalysts.