A nitrogen and boron co-doped metal-free carbon electrocatalyst for an efficient oxygen reduction reaction

To tackle the issues of high cost, low durability and poor resistance to chemical poisoning of Pt-based materials as cathode catalysts for an oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), an effective method is to design and synthesize heteroatom doped carbon materials, regarded as promising electrocatalysts to replace Pt-based counterparts, due to their low cost, high stability and anti-poisoning ability. The potential of N, B co-doping has been proved by theoretical calculations, and there are still great challenges in the synthesis of such materials. Here, we employ a facile approach to obtain a N, B co-doped carbon material. The resulting material pyrolysed at 1000 °C (NBC-1000) shows excellent ORR activity, exceeding that of the same type of catalysts reported so far. Not only is the NBC-1000 electrocatalyst comparable to the commercial Pt/C in terms of the onset potential, half-wave potential, diffusion limiting current density and electron transfer number, but also it has better durability and methanol tolerance than Pt/C.