Self-Sacrificing Template Synthesis of Carbon Nanosheets Assembled Hollow Spheres with Abundant Active Fe-N4 O1 Moieties for Electrocatalytic Oxygen Reduction.

Abstract

Single-atom Fe-N-C (Fe1 -N-C) materials represent the benchmarked electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). However, single Fe atoms in the carbon skeletons cannot be fully utilized due to the mass transfer limitation, severely restricting their intrinsic ORR properties. Herein, a self-sacrificing template strategy is developed to fabricate ultrathin nanosheets assembled Fe1 -N-C hollow microspheres (denoted as Fe1 /N-HCMs) by rational carbonization of Fe3+ chelating polydopamine coated melamine cyanuric acid complex. The shell of Fe1 /N-HCMs is constructed by ultrathin nanosheets with thickness of only 2nm, which is supposed to be an ideal platform to isolate and fully expose single metal atoms. Benefiting from unique hierarchical hollow architecture with highly open porous structure, 2nm-thick ultrathin nanosheet subunits and abundant Fe-N4 O1 active sites revealed by X-ray absorption fine structure analysis, the Fe1 /N-HCMs exhibit high ORR performance with a positive half-wave potential of 0.88V versus the reversible hydrogen electrode and robust stability. When served as air-cathode catalysts with ultralow loading mass of 0.25mg cm-2 , Fe1 /N-HCMs based Zn-air batteries present a maximum power density of 187mW cm-2 and discharge specific capacity of 806mA h gZn -1 in primary Zn-air batteries, all exceeding those of commercial Pt/C.