N, P dual-doped multi-wrinkled nanosheets prepared from the egg crude lecithin as the efficient metal-free electrocatalyst for oxygen reduction reaction

Abstract

N, P dual-doped carbon nanosheets was prepared by an in-situ foaming technology. The crude lecithin extracted from egg yolk was explored to prepare this novel carbon material. In the synthesis process, the crude lecithin molecular is as the Gemini surfactant and the graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) plays the role of self-sacrificing template. At the high temperature, the sandwich-mixture “lecithin/C3N4/lecithin” expanded and carbonized with the decomposition of g-C3N4. This induces the formation of many multi-wrinkled nanosheets and synchronously constitute a multi-doped carbon foam. This unique carbon material exhibits a super-efficient catalytic activity towards oxygen reduction reaction, with the limited current density of 6.7 mA cm−2 tested at 1600 rpm in 0.1 M KOH solution, which is far larger than that of Pt/C (20%) catalyst (5.5 mA cm−2). It was demonstrated that this novel catalyst also possesses great catalytic stability. After about 9 h continuous test, the current density of this catalyst remained above 91%. These results demonstrate that the N, P dual-doped multi-wrinkled carbon nanosheets can be used as the high-efficient metal-free electrocatalyst towards oxygen reduction reaction.