General and Ultrafast Photothermal Synthesis of Atomic Metal‐Nitrogen‐Carbon Catalysts for H2O2 Electrosynthesis

Abstract

AbstractAtomic metal‐nitrogen‐carbon catalysts (M‐N‐Cs) are promising electrocatalysts for the two‐electron oxygen reduction reaction (2e− ORR) for the green production of H2O2. However, the conventional synthetic methods of M‐N‐Cs typically suffer from prolonged possessing time and high energy consumption. Herein, a flash light irradiation‐assisted transient pyrolysis strategy is reported for the rapid and facile synthesis of a Co‐N‐C catalyst consisting of atomic Co‐N4 sites supported on graphene. The resultant Co‐N‐C is highly active and selective as an electrocatalyst for the 2e− ORR, with a H2O2 selectivity up to 94.2%, high mass activity of 113.9 A g−1, high turnover frequency of 34.8 s−1, and an average H2O2 production rate of 12.1 mol g−1 h−1 with an accumulated H2O2 concentration up to 15.2 mmol L−1 when evaluated with a three‐phase flow cell setup. Additionally, this synthetic strategy can be readily expanded to prepare other types of M‐N‐Cs (M = Fe, Ni, Cu, and noble metal Ir) with similar M‐N4 configurations by simply changing the metal precursors, demonstrating the generality of this method. The rapid and general flash‐assisted synthetic strategy for M‐N‐Cs can provide a readily accessible material library and platform for investigating their catalytic properties in different energy conversion processes.