Active Salt/Silica-Templated 2D Mesoporous FeCo-N-x-Carbon as Bifunctional Oxygen Electrodes for Zinc-Air Batteries

Two types of templates, an active metal salt and silica nanoparticles, are used concurrently to achieve the facile synthesis of hierarchical meso/microporous FeCo-N-x-carbon nanosheets (meso/micro-FeCo-N-x-CN) with highly dispersed metal sites. The resulting meso/micro-FeCo-N-x-CN shows high and reversible oxygen electrocatalytic performances for both ORR and OER, thus having potential for applications in rechargeable Zn-air battery. Our approach creates a new pathway to fabricate 2D meso/microporous structured carbon architectures for bifunctional oxygen electrodes in rechargeable Zn-air battery as well as opens avenues to the scale-up production of rationally designed heteroatom-doped catalytic materials for a broad range of applications.