Metal-free and Oxygen-free Graphene as Oxygen Reduction Catalysts for Highly Efficient Fuel Cells.

摘要

Oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) is important in fuel cells. Although platinum nanoparticles can catalyse the ORR in an efficient way, the high cost of the platinum catalysts, together with its limited reserves in nature, has been shown to be the major 'showstopper' to mass market fuel cells for commercial applications. Following our earlier work on metal-free, nitrogen- doped carbon nanotubes (Gong, K.; Du, F.; Xia, Z.; Durstock, M.; Dai, L. Science 2009, 323, 760) and nitrogen-doped graphene sheets (Qu, L.; Liu, Y.; Baek, J.-B.; Dai, L. ACS Nano 2010, 4, 1321) as highly efficient ORR, we have developed in this project new metal-free and oxygen-free graphene materials by either edge-functionalization or ball milling as efficient electrocatalysts for ORR in fuel cells and other applications, including dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs).