Edge Defects Engineering of Nitrogen-Doped Carbon for Oxygen Electrocatalysts in Zn-air Batteries

Metal-free bifunctional oxygen electrocatalysts are extremely critical to the advanced energy conversion devices, such as high energy metal-air batteries. Effective tuning of edge defects and electronic density on carbon materials via simple methods is especially attractive. In this work, a facile alkali activation method has been proposed to prepare carbon with large specific surface area and optimized porosity. And subsequent nitrogen-doping leads to high pyridinic-N & graphitic-N content and abundant edge defects, further enhancing electrochemical activities. Theoretical modeling via first principles calculations has been conducted to correlate the electrocatalytic activities with their fundamental chemical structure of N doping and edge defects engineering. The metal-free product (NKCNPs-900) shows a high half-wave potential of 0.79 V (ORR). Furthermore, the assembled Zn-air batteries display excellent performance among carbon-based metal-free oxygen electrocatalysts, such as large peak power density up to 131.4 mW cm-2, energy density as high as 889.0 Wh kg-1 at 4.5 mA cm-2, and remarkable discharge-charge cycles up to 575 times. Preliminarily, the rechargeable nonaqueous Li-air batteries were also investigated. Therefore, our work provides a low-cost, metal-free and high-performance bifunctional carbon-based electrocatalyst for metal-air batteries.