A Simple Approach towards High-Performance Perovskite-Based Bifunctional Oxygen Electrocatalysts

To accelerate the large-scale commercialization of electrochemical energy storage and conversion technologies through water splitting and regeneration in reversible fuel cells, cost-effective, highly efficient, and durable reversible oxygen electrodes are required. We report a comparatively simple approach to modify a group of oxygen-evolving perovskites based on lanthanum cobaltite into effective bifunctional systems through partial atom substitution, which, upon intermixing with nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes, achieve remarkably low round-trip overvoltage of < 850 mV in the electrocatalysis of oxygen reduction and oxygen evolution in an alkaline electrolyte, KOH (0.1 M). Besides the bifunctional electrocatalytic performance, the composite systems with a low Fe content possessed promising long-term stability.