Nitrogen-doped Carbon with Hierarchical Porous Structure for Electrocatalysis of Oxygen Reduction Reaction

With fuel cells gaining recognition as promising devices for directly converting the chemical energy to electricity, to develop low-cost catalysts for electrocatalysis of oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) has become an active topic in this field. Hierarchical porous carbon materials (HPC) doped with heteroatoms, for instance N, S and Fe, are promising materials for using as catalysts for the ORR due to their low cost, high stability and high efficiency. In this work, we report a low-cost, facile and scalable method to produce nitrogen-doped hierarchical porous carbon material (N-HPC) by pyrolysis of corncobs. The activated N-HPC catalysts exhibit high activity for ORR compared to that of the state-of-the-art commercial Pt/C catalysts.