title: Manganese oxide-induced strategy to high-performance iron/nitrogen/carbon electrocatalysts with highly exposed active sites.
abstract: Iron/nitrogen/carbon (Fe/N/C) catalyst is so far the most promising non-precious metal electrocatalyst for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in acidic medium, whose performance depends closely on the synthesis chemistry. Herein, we report a MnOx-induced strategy to construct the Fe/N/C with highly exposed Fe-Nx active sites, which involves the uniform spreading of polyaniline on hierarchical N-doped carbon nanocages by a reactive-template polymerization, followed by the successive iron incorporation and polyaniline pyrolysis. The resulting Fe/N/C demonstrates an excellent ORR performance, including an onset potential of 0.92 V (vs. RHE), four electron selectivity, superb stability and immunity to methanol crossover. The excellent performance is well correlated with the greatly enhanced surface active sites of the catalyst stemming from the unique MnOx-induced strategy. This study provides an efficient approach for exploring the advanced ORR electrocatalysts by increasing the exposed active sites.
authors.affiliation: Jiangsu Provincial Lab for NanoTechnology and Key Laboratory of Mesoscopic Chemistry of MOE, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China. wqchem@nju.edu.cn zhenghu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Tao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: Jiangsu Provincial Lab for NanoTechnology and Key Laboratory of Mesoscopic Chemistry of MOE, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China. wqchem@nju.edu.cn zhenghu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Qiang
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Jiangsu Provincial Lab for NanoTechnology and Key Laboratory of Mesoscopic Chemistry of MOE, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China. wqchem@nju.edu.cn zhenghu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Ou
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Zhuo
authors.affiliation: Jiangsu Provincial Lab for NanoTechnology and Key Laboratory of Mesoscopic Chemistry of MOE, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China. wqchem@nju.edu.cn zhenghu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yufei
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: Jiangsu Provincial Lab for NanoTechnology and Key Laboratory of Mesoscopic Chemistry of MOE, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China. wqchem@nju.edu.cn zhenghu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yongfeng
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Bu
authors.affiliation: Jiangsu Provincial Lab for NanoTechnology and Key Laboratory of Mesoscopic Chemistry of MOE, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China. wqchem@nju.edu.cn zhenghu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Lijun
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Jiangsu Provincial Lab for NanoTechnology and Key Laboratory of Mesoscopic Chemistry of MOE, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China. wqchem@nju.edu.cn zhenghu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Xizhang
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Jiangsu Provincial Lab for NanoTechnology and Key Laboratory of Mesoscopic Chemistry of MOE, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China. wqchem@nju.edu.cn zhenghu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Zheng
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Hu