Issue 1, 2019

Noble metal supported hexagonal boron nitride for the oxygen reduction reaction: a DFT study

Abstract

Discovering active, stable and cost-effective catalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) is of utmost interest for commercialization of fuel cells. Scarce and expensive noble metals such as Pt and Pd are the state-of-the-art active ORR catalysts but suffer from low stability against CO poisoning. Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) is a particularly attractive material due to its low cost and stability; however, it suffers from intrinsic low activity toward the ORR in the pristine form as a result of its inherently low conductivity with a large band gap of ∼5.5 electron volts. During the past few years, several strategies such as using metal supports, metal doping and atomic vacancies have been reported to significantly increase the conductivity, thereby promoting the ORR activity. Herein we use density functional theory calculations to systematically study these strategies for activating inert h-BN and further examine the stability against CO poisoning. We show that noble metals, such as Ag, Pd, and Pt, require boron (B) or nitrogen (N) vacancies to reasonably activate h-BN toward the ORR. For example, Pd supported h-BN with B-vacancies exhibits significantly high ORR activity. All three examined metal supported h-BNs are predicted to be stable against CO poisoning. These results demonstrate that supporting h-BN on noble metals is a promising strategy to increase the stability against CO poisoning while maintaining high ORR activity.

Graphical abstract: Noble metal supported hexagonal boron nitride for the oxygen reduction reaction: a DFT study

Associated articles

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
24 Jun 2018
Accepted
10 Oct 2018
First published
26 Oct 2018
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Nanoscale Adv., 2019,1, 132-139

Noble metal supported hexagonal boron nitride for the oxygen reduction reaction: a DFT study

S. Back and S. Siahrostami, Nanoscale Adv., 2019, 1, 132 DOI: 10.1039/C8NA00059J

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements