The activity of Fe/Co/Ni multi-metal doped electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reaction

In order to reveal the relationship between the structure and the electrochemical oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) activity of different double transition metal decorated catalysts, three different double transition metal and N co-doped carbon material cathode catalyst materials (FeCo–NC, FeNi–NC and CoNi–NC) were prepared in this study. The FeCo–NC catalysts synthesised in this study still showed high ORR activity under alkaline conditions, with a half-wave potential of 0.783 V RHE , a mass activity (MA) of 11.36 A/g (0.77 V RHE ) and an ultimate current density of − 4.46 mA cm −2 ; after 30,000 cycles, the half-wave potential only decreased to 99.3% of the initial potential. Meanwhile, we employ MS to establish three different double transition metal and N co-doped graphene catalysts and to calculate and analyse their desorption properties, leading to the FeCo–NC material being the model with the highest ORR activity, which is consistent with the experimental results. Graphical Abstract