Engineering High-Energy Interfacial Structures for High-Performance Oxygen-Involving Electrocatalysis

Abstract

Engineering high-energy interfacial structures for high-performance electrocatalysis is achieved by chemical coupling of active CoO nanoclusters and high-index facet Mn3O4 nano-octahedrons (hi-Mn3O4). A thorough characterization, including synchrotron-based near edge X-ray absorption fine structure, reveals that strong interactions between both components promote the formation of high-energy interfacial Mn-O-Co species and high oxidation state CoO, from which electrons are drawn by MnIII-O present in hi-Mn3O4. The CoO/hi-Mn3O4 demonstrates an excellent catalytic performance over the conventional metal oxide-based electrocatalysts, which is reflected by 1.2 times higher oxygen evolution reaction (OER) activity than that of Ru/C and a comparable oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) activity to that of Pt/C as well as a better stability than that of Ru/C (95 % vs. 81 % retained OER activity) and Pt/C (92 % vs. 78 % retained ORR activity after 10 h running) in alkaline electrolyte.