Templated N-Doped Carbons for Energy Storage and Conversion

Sustainable energy sources, energy storage and conversion devices are required to satisfy the global increase in energy demand and to minimize the environmental problems associated with the use of fossil fuels. Carbon materials are extensively used in supercapacitors, batteries, and fuel cells. For this reason, methods aimed at the development of new carbon materials, with high surface areas and tailorable surface chemistry has been an area of interest for the last couple of decades. More recently, heteroatom-doped carbons have obtained more attention due to the possibility of enhancing the catalytic activity of Pt as well as replacing Pt by non-noble metals, particularly N-doped carbons. In this study, mesoporous carbon (MC) materials were produced by carbonization of nitrogen-rich, melamine-formaldehyde (MF) polymer gels in the presence of SiO2 nanoparticles as a hard-template. Carbon products (MF-NC) with up to 8 N-atom% and surface areas up to 440 m2/g were obtained depending on the SiO2 content (20 nm) and annealing conditions (950°C or 1500°C). Pt/MF-NC were prepared by an impregnation method to evaluate the electrochemical performance of these modified carbon materials as catalyst supports. The incorporation of Fe was also considered to replace Pt as the catalyst, and preliminary stability and catalytic activity toward the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) will be discussed in this paper.