Spatially Confined Formation of Single Atoms in Highly Porous Carbon Nitride Nanoreactors.

Zuo, Yunpeng; Li, Tingting; Zhang, Ning; Jing, Tianyun; Rao, Dewei; Schmuki, Patrik; Kment, Štěpán; Zbořil, Radek et al. · ACS Nano · 2021

basic_science · Level V

Where this comes from

Abstract

Reducing the size of a catalyst to a single atom (SA) level can dramatically change its physicochemical properties and significantly boost its catalytic activity. However, the massive synthesis of SA catalysts still remains a grand challenge mainly because of the aggregation and nucleation of the generated atoms during the reaction. Here, we design and implement a spatially confined synthetic strategy based on a porous-hollow carbon nitride (<i>p</i>-CN) coordinated with 1-butyl-3-methylimidazole hexafluorophosphate, which can act as a nanoreactor and allow us to obtain metal SA catalysts (<i>p</i>-CN@M SAs). This relatively easy and highly effective method provides a way to massively synthesize single/multiple atoms (<i>p</i>-CN@M SAs, M = Pt, Pd, Cu, Fe, <i>etc</i>.). Moreover, the amorphous NiB-coated <i>p</i>-CN@Pt SAs can further increase the loading amount of Pt SAs to 3.7 wt %. The synthesized <i>p</i>-CN@Pt&NiB electrocatalyst exhibits an extraordinary hydrogen evolution reaction activity with the overpotential of 40.6 mV@10 mA/cm<sup>-2</sup> and the Tofel slope of 29.26 mV/dec.