Hydrothermal Transformation of Dried Grass into Graphitic Carbon‐Based High Performance Electrocatalyst for Oxygen Reduction Reaction

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Abstract
In this work, we present a low cost and environmentally benign hydrothermal method using dried grass as the sole starting material without any synthetic chemicals to directly produce high quality nitrogen‐doped carbon nanodot/nanosheet aggregates (N‐CNAs), achieving a high yield of 25.2%. The fabricated N‐CNAs possess an N/C atomic ratio of 3.41%, consist of three typed of doped N at a ratio of 2.6 (pyridinic):1.7 (pyrrolic):1 (graphitic). The experimental results reveal that for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), the performance of N‐CNAs, in terms of electrocatalytic activity, stability and resistance to crossover effects, is better or comparable to the commercial Pt/C electrocatalyst. The theoretical studies further indicate that the doped pyridinic‐N plays a key role for N‐CNAs' excellent four‐electron ORR electrocatalytic activity.

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