Nitrogen-Doped Carbon Cubosomes as an Efficient Electrocatalyst with High Accessibility of Internal Active Sites

Abstract

Porous carbon particles (PCPs) present considerable potential for applications across a wide range of fields, particularly within the realms of energy and catalysis. The control of their overall morphologies and pore structures has remained a big challenge. Here, using metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) as the precursor and polymer cubosomes (PCs) as the template, nitrogen-doped carbon cubosomes (SP-NCs) with a single primitive bicontinuous architecture are prepared. SP-NCs inherit the high porosity of MOFs, generating a high specific surface area of 825 m 2 g –1 and uniformly distributed active sites with a 5.9 at % nitrogen content. Thanks to the presence of three-dimensional continuous mesochannels that enable much higher accessibility of internal active sites over those of their porous counterparts’ lack of continuous channels, SP-NCs exhibit superior electrocatalytic performance for oxygen reduction reaction with a half-wave potential of 0.87 V, situating them in the leading level of the reported carbon electrocatalysts. Serving as an air cathode catalyst of the Zn–air battery, SP-NCs exhibit excellent performance, outperforming the commercial Pt/C catalysts.