Flower-like Ni and N codoped hierarchical porous carbon microspheres with enhanced performance for fuel cell storage

Nowadays, the design and development of highly efficient and low-cost bifunctional electrodes for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) are in urgent demand for energy conversion and storage technologies, such as fuel cells, metal-air batteries and water-splitting cells. Herein, to mitigate this challenge, a novel cost-effective flower-like Ni and N codoped hierarchical porous carbon microspheres (denoted as F-Ni/N-HPCMs) electrode has been fabricated by a simple two-step method. Benefiting from the unique structure property, the F-Ni/N-HPCMs show excellent ORR and OER performance. More importantly, H2-O2 alkaline polymer electrolyte fuel cell (APEFC) fabricated with the F-Ni/N-HPCMs cathode shows an open circuit potential of 0.84 V and a high performance of 208 mW cm−2. And, the performance is better than the reported APEFCs constructed with other non-precious metal electrodes. Hence, this work provides a new strategy to fabricate high performance electrodes for fuel cell storage.