Fungi residue derived carbon as highly efficient hydrogen peroxide electrocatalyst

•Highly efficient biocarbon catalyst was first developed with fungiresidue biomass.•This work provides a facile way to produce excellent low-cost H2O2 electrocatalyst.•The selectivity of FRC exceeds state of the art catalysts with Max H2O2% 98%.

In electrochemical devices, the reduction of dissolved oxygen in electrolyte can achieve on-site production of hydrogen peroxide. The industrial viability of the process strongly depends on cathode electrocatalyst. However, current catalysts rely on rare, noble metals and their composite. Thus, it remains a great challenge of cost-effective catalyst with both high activity and selectivity. Herein, we made use of extremely low-cost fungi residue biomass, developing a multi-non-precious metal doped carbon catalyst (named as FRC) for H2O2 electrogeneration by facile in-situ synthesis. The one-step prepared FRC balances the performance of different metal oxides and exhibits not only high activity but also high selectivity at a spacious potential range. Specifically, the current density for ring reaches 0.45 mA cm−2 at −0.5 V (vs SCE). Besides, the selectivity achieves 98% and remain above 91% in wide potential range (−0.7 ∼ −0.3 V), which exceeds almost all metal contained carbon materials to our knowledge. As the first study of fungi residue towards H2O2 electrogeneration, this novel approach provides a highly promising and low cost electrocatalyst for real production, moreover, exploring a new direction for H2O2 electrocatalyst development.

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