Important progress in the research of new nitride electrocatalyst of Shanghai Silicate Institute

The massive use of fossil energy has brought serious environmental pollution and energy crisis It can be predicted that in the near future, the energy utilization mode of human society will be transformed from limited carbon based fossil energy to endless renewable energy Fuel cells and metal air cells play an important role in such energy conversion At present, the expensive Pt catalyst has been used in fuel cell It is reported that Pt catalyst accounts for about 20% of the cost of the whole fuel cell, which is one of the important reasons why such high-efficiency energy devices have not been widely used Therefore, the development of low-cost electrocatalytic materials with high activity and stability remains a great challenge Recently, researcher Wang Jiacheng, Shanghai Silicate Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, researcher Yang Minghui, Ningbo Institute of materials technology and engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Professor J Paul attfield, University of Edinburgh, UK, and Professor tiju Thomas, Indian Institute of technology, found that zirconium based materials can replace precious metals The great potential of Pt catalyst Pt metal reserves are very rare and very expensive, up to about 300 yuan per gram; compared with Zr metal reserves, the price is only 1 / 700 of Pt The research results were recently published in the international famous journal Nature Materials (DOI: 10.1038 / s41563-019-0535-9), and the title of the paper is "zircon nitride catalysts surpassplatinum for oxygen reduction" Researcher Wang Jiacheng, as the co first author of this paper, participated in the important work of experiment design, data analysis, mechanism mining, etc Ma Ruguang, deputy researcher of Shanghai Silicate Institute, participated in the work In this study, researchers used a mild urea glass method to prepare ZrN nanoparticles with high activity at a lower temperature The research shows that ZrN nanoparticles have the same activity as commercial Pt catalysts In addition, ZrN also shows better long-term stability than Pt In the actual test of zinc air battery, the performance of commercial Pt catalyst decays obviously after a period of time, while the performance of ZrN catalyst decays much more slowly In the future, the research team will further work with the industry to transform the research results of the laboratory into practical innovative products, which will contribute to the large-scale use of clean energy and is expected to contribute to solving the energy crisis and environmental pollution problems