Catalysts for oxygen reduction and evolution reactions are at the heart of key renewable-energy technologies including fuel cells and water splitting. Despite tremendous efforts, developing oxygen electrode catalysts with high activity at low cost remains a great challenge. Here, we report a hybrid material consisting of Co₃O₄ nanocrystals grown on reduced graphene oxide as a high-performance b...

Different types of crystalline carbon nanomaterials were used to reinforce polyaniline for use in electromechanical bilayer bending actuators. The objective is to analyze how the different graphitic structures of the nanocarbons affect and improve the in situ polymerized polyaniline composites and their subsequent actuator behavior. The nanocarbons investigated were multiwalled carbon nanotubes...

Catalysts for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) are at the heart of key green-energy fuel cell technology. N-doped graphene is a potential metal-free electrode with much better electrocatalytic activity, long-term stability, and tolerance to crossover effect than expensive platinum-based electrocatalysts. Here, we report a feasible direct-synthesis method in preparing N-graphene with manageable N...

Doping of low-dimensional graphitic materials, including graphene, graphene quantum dots and single-wall carbon nanotubes with nitrogen, sulfur or boron can significantly change their properties. We report that simple fluorination followed by annealing in a dopant source can superdope low-dimensional graphitic materials with a high level of N, S or B. The superdoping results in the following do...

A series of nitrogen-doped porous graphene foams (NPGFs) have been prepared by hydrothermally treating a mixed solution of graphite oxide (GO) and ammonia. The NPGFs are used as the counter electrode (CE) material for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) in conjunction with the conventional iodide-based electrolyte and the recently developed sulfide-based electrolyte. Tafel-polarization tests and ...

Development of efficient electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) is one of the most important issues for optimizing the performance of fuel cells and metal-air batteries. The introduction of nitrogen into carbon nanostructures has created new pathways for the development of non-precious electrocatalysts in fuel cells. In this work, nitrogen-doped graphene (NG) was synthesized by a ...

In this work, we show the doping of graphene most likely from heteroatoms induced by the substrate using Raman spectra, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy and ab initio molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The doping of graphene on a highly boron-doped silicon substrate was achieved by an annealing at 400 K for about 3 h in an oven with air flow. With the sam...

Here, we demonstrate that Cobalt/cobalt oxide core-shell nanoparticles integrated on nitrogen-doped (N-doped) three-dimensional reduced graphene oxide aerogel-based architecture (Co/CoO-NGA) were synthesized through a facile hydrothermal method followed by annealing treatment. The unique endurable porous structure could provide sufficient mass transfer channels and ample active sites on Co/CoO-...

In order to disclose the reason that the N-doped carbon support can enhance the stability of Au-based catalysts for acetylene hydrochlorination, we established a big graphene cluster model of C110H28 to investigate the effect of different nitrogen-doped carbon supports on three kinds of gold species models of Au dimers, Au2Cl2 and Au2Cl6, through DFT calculations. Comparing the adsorption energ...