Abstract
Nowadays, due to the worldwide growth demand of energy, over consumption of fossil fuel as well as their accompanying increased negative environmental impacts, the development of renewable energy systems, such as fuel cells and water electrolyzers, is becoming one of the “holy grail” for researchers. However, their large-scale applications have been severely limited by precious and unsustainable noble-metal electrocatalysts. Hence, it is highly desirable to develop robust electrocatalysts composed exclusively of low-cost and earth-abundant elements, to reduce or replace expensive and scarce noble-metals. Carbon-based nanomaterials, including heteroatoms-doped carbons and carbon-encapsulated metal materials, have recently attracted great interests because they show remarkable electrocatalytic performance and long-term stability for energy-related reactions, such as oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions (OER), hydrazine oxidation reaction (HzOR), etc. This review summarizes the recent progress in heteroatoms-doped carbon and carbon-encapsulated metal materials, highlighting the promise as cost-efficient electrocatalysts. Finally, a prospective on the future development of these promising materials is offered.
Highlights
The over consumption of fossil fuel reserves and their ongoing negative environmental impacts have driven the development of alternative, environmentally-friendly energy systems to reduce and/or eliminate our over-reliance on fossil fuels (Chow et al, 2003; Barnett et al, 2012; Subbaraman et al, 2012)
The large-scale commercialization of fuel cells and water electrolyzer has so far been hampered by expensive and unsustainable electrocatalysts used for boosting the sluggish reactions at both anode and cathode, such as oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), hydrogen oxidation reaction (HOR), and water splitting including oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reactions (HER) (Yang et al, 2008; Bhowmik et al, 2016; Cheng et al, 2016; Guo et al, 2016; Huang et al, 2018)
We will discuss the synthetic procedure of heteroatoms-doped carbons and carbonencapsulated metal materials, as well as their characterizations and electrochemical performance
Summary
The over consumption of fossil fuel reserves (natural gas, petroleum, coal, etc.) and their ongoing negative environmental impacts (e.g., water, air, and soil pollution) have driven the development of alternative, environmentally-friendly energy systems to reduce and/or eliminate our over-reliance on fossil fuels (Chow et al, 2003; Barnett et al, 2012; Subbaraman et al, 2012). Among the various electrocatalysts being investigated, carbon-based materials, including heteroatoms-doped carbons and carbon-encapsulated metal materials, have drawn increasing attentions due to their low-cost, high-efficiency, and good longterm durability (Figure 1).
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