Fabricating Single‐Atom Catalysts from Chelating Metal in Open Frameworks

• DOI: 10.1002/adma.201808193
• Publication Date: 2019-03-25T10:05:49Z
• Authors: Yichao Lin; Pingying Liu; Ever Velasco; Ge Yao; Ziqi Tian; Linjuan Zhang; Liang Chen
• Keywords: Metalation

In the present study, a highly efficient strategy is reported using open framework platforms with abundant chelating ligands to fabricate series of stable metal single-atom catalysts (SACs). Here, ions are initially anchored onto active bipyridine sites through postsynthetic modification, followed by pyrolysis and acid leaching. The resulting single atoms uniformly distributed on nitrogen-doped carbon (N-C) matrix. Interestingly, each atom found be coordinated five N atoms, in contrast average coordination number four as previously reported. as-prepared Fe SAC/N-C catalyst exhibits excellent oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) activity (with half-wave potential 0.89 V), outstanding stability, good methanol tolerance. density functional calculations reveal that pyridine can favorably modulate interaction strength ion thus improve ORR activity. More importantly, it demonstrated this successfully extended preparation other transition SACs, simply altering precursors used metalation step.