Porous Fe, N co-doped carbon with high electrocatalytic oxygen reduction reaction performance in Zn-air battery

Non-Pt electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reactions (ORR) have been developed using metal and nitrogen co -doped carbon electrocatalysts. However, challenges remain regarding the porosity of the catalyst, distribution of active sites, and the easy aggregation of the metal components. Herein, we report a bottom-up preparation strategy to obtain a porous ethynyl-linked conjugated microporous polymer (CMP) precursor containing triazine units and bipyridine, ensuring high N content and coordination with Fe3+. The Fe doped CMP is then carbon-ization into a Fe, N co-doped nanoporous carbon material (BPCMP-Fe-800), which can be taken as the elec-trocatalyst in ORR. BPCMP-Fe-800 catalyst exhibits electrocatalytic performance dominated by 4(e)(-) transfer mechanism with the onset potential of 0.97 V, half-wave potential of 0.85 V, and higher kinetic current density of 11.3 mA cm(-2) (0.8 V). In addition, when applied as cathode electrocatalyst in zinc-air batteries, BPCMP-Fe-800 displays more competitive power density (179.5 mW cm(-2)) and specific capacity (790.5 mAh g(-1)) compared with Pt/C. Our study demonstrates a general and facile approach for porous Fe, N co-doped carbon with the potential as alternatives to Pt catalysts for efficient ORR catalytic performances and provides new insights of multi-atom catalysts for other energy conversion related catalytic reactions.