A Design of Cobalt and Nitrogen Doped Nanoporous Carbon Sphere Synthesis

Abstract

As problems regarding the decline in available fossil fuels and climate change are on the rise, our societies strive to develop clean, sustainable, and efficient sources of energy. Many developments in such branches of research include energy conversion and storage, hence the importance of new technologies and their composing materials are attracting attention worldwide. On this basic premise, porous carbons are widely used as adsorbents, catalyst support materials, supercapacitors, batteries, and hydrogen storage due to its large specific surface areas, high conductivity, and exceptional chemical stability. Herein, we present a nanoporous carbon material with unique hierarchical structures that are heteroatom doped, to enhance ORR performance. To date, hard templating is used to make various carbon structures, yet these methods are tedious and unflexible due to the limiting of the parent template. Yet soft templating is also limited to the few known precursors for synthesis due to its picky requirements for stable reactions. This research gives insight into a soft template-based silica-assisted method for the preparation of nitrogen-doped hollow nanoporous carbon spheres(N-HNCS). Nitrogen doping is accomplished during the reaction process, without need of after treatment, therefore enhancing electrocatalytical performance without more complication of the methodology. After establishing a modified soft templating process, we introduced cobalt into the synthesis to boost ORR performance. With fine adjustment of the mechanism, we controlled the reaction to form well-dispersed cobalt particles with minimum agglomeration. This sheds light on the progress of new experimental procedures to develop more active and promising non-noble catalysts in large and stable batches.