Tailoring electrocatalytic activity of in situ crafted perovskite oxide nanocrystals via size and dopant control

Abstract

The ability to scrutinize the correlation of dimension, composition, and dopant to electrocatalytic performance renders the development of highly active electrocatalysts. This work reports a general and robust strategy for crafting uniform perovskite oxide nanoparticles (i.e., BaTiO 3 and La- and Co-doped BaTiO 3 ) with controlled sizes and dopant compositions by employing amphiphilic star-like diblock copolymers as nanoreactors. Their size- and dopant-dependent oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) performances are unveiled. Particularly, La- and Co-doped BaTiO 3 nanoparticles exhibit markedly improved ORR activities over the pristine counterparts due to reduced free energy barrier of ORR and increased conductivity as substantiated by density functional theory. The nanoreactor strategy could be conveniently extended to yield various functional nanomaterials of interest with tailored sizes and compositions for electrocatalysis.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jun 14, 2021
Source ID
10.1073/pnas.2014086118

Entities

People

  • Hai-Ping Cheng
  • Jiawei Zhang
  • Jun Jiang
  • Lei Zhu
  • Qiong Li
  • Shuang Liang
  • Shuanglong Liu
  • Yan Yan
  • Yanjie He
  • Yeu-wei Harn
  • Zewei Wang
  • Zhiqun Lin
  • Zili Li

Organizations

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • Case Western Reserve University
  • Georgia Tech
  • National Science Foundation
  • Office of Basic Energy Sciences
  • University of Florida

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Materials science

Readers

  • Electrochemical Engineering/ Fuel Cell Technologies
  • Nanocomposite Materials Science

Technology Areas

  • Biotechnology
  • Microelectronics