Traditional earth-abundant coal as new energy materials to catalyze the oxygen reduction reaction in alkaline solution
By Xingxing Chen and Xinning Huang and Tao Wang and Stefan Barwe and Kunpeng Xie and Yasin Ugur Kayran and Daniela Wintrich and Wolfgang Schuhmann and Justus Masa
Published in Electrochimica Acta
2016
Abstract
Coal is an earth-abundant energy resource, however, its direct combustion results in serious environmental pollution. Therefore, it becomes important to design value-added products from coal and to maximize its value chain. Herein, brown coal was used to develop non-precious metal catalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in fuel cells as green energy conversion systems. The brown coal was first pretreated with different acids, followed by N-doping at 800