Synthesis of Polypyrrole on Onion like Carbon As Catalytic Support for ORR

Abstract

One of the world’s main energy source is the fossil fuels, it’s a resource that is not renewable and can cause irreparable damage to the environment. From oil spills into the ocean to carbon emissions of cars are the world’s most significant threat to human health and future and are major contributors to global inequality and environmental injustice. Worldwide efforts are being made to avoid global warming consequences and researchers are willing to work on the replacement of this energy source. The research I am working on it focuses on making a catalyst that is economical, efficient and above all environment friendly. One of the energy conversion system is the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), which is due to fuel cells. Fuel cells can generate electricity by reducing oxygen electrochemically getting water as a by-product. Using materials with high conductivity can be beneficial in the reaction process. Therefore, we use Onion-like carbon (OLC) as the catalyst support due to their high conductivity and high surface-to-volume ratio. The use of polymers with high conductivity in combination with carbon material have been previously studied for ORR. We use previously polymerized OLC with pyrrole as a support for the catalyst. The OLC/PPy particles produced are dope with nitrogen by the polymerization of the pyrrole monomer. These particles are characterized using the following techniques, Raman, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS). Then synthesis is caried out using nonprecious metals. The non-precious metals that we use are iron and cobalt. The FeCo-OLC/PPy particle is then tested using electrochemical measurements as well ORR experiments. A future work will be characterizing these samples using synchrotron techniques.