Surfactant-Template Preparation of Polyaniline Semi-Tubes for Oxygen Reduction

Shiming Zhang,Shengli Chen

doi:10.3390/catal5031202

Shiming Zhang, Shengli Chen

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/catal5031202

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Journal: Catalysts (Basel, Switzerland)	Publication Date: Jul 7, 2015
Citations: 41	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Wuhan University

Abstract

Nitrogen and metal doped nanocarbons derived from polyaniline (PANI) have been widely explored as electrocatalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in fuel cells. In this work, we report surfactant-template synthesis of PANI nanostructures and the ORR electrocatalysts derived from them. By using cationic surfactant such as the cetyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) as the template and the negatively charged persulfate ions as the oxidative agent to stimulate the aniline polymerization in the micelles of CTAB, PANI with a unique 1-D semi-tubular structure can be obtained. The semi-tubular structure can be maintained even after high-temperature treatment at 900 °C, which yields materials exhibiting promising ORR activity.

Highlights

Seeking the highly-active electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) has become the one of the urgent demands for fuel cells, which would take a key role in the “hydrogen energy economy” [1]
When the FeCl3 was used to replace ammonium persulfate (APS) as the oxidative agent to stimulate the polymerization of aniline in cetyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) solution, irregular PANI nanosheets were obtained (Figure 2b)
These results indicated that the semi-cannular structured PANIs can be uniquely formed through the oxidative polymerization of anilines by APS in the assemblies of CTAB

Summary

Introduction

Seeking the highly-active electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) has become the one of the urgent demands for fuel cells, which would take a key role in the “hydrogen energy economy” [1]. A variety of N-doped carbon catalysts based on PANI have been constructed which showed superior electrocatalytic activities for the ORR [7,8,9,10,11,12]. It has been generally accepted that the formation of uniform and ordered carbon nanostructures is very important in enhancing the catalytic activity [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. We use assembly architectures of a variety of surfactants as the soft-templates to synthesize PANI nanostructures. The electrocatalysts derived from these PANI semi-tubes show good ORR catalytic activity in alkaline

Results and Discussion

Chemicals and Materials

Materials Synthesis

Characterization

Electrochemical Measurement

Conclusions