Salt-assisted gas-liquid interfacial fluorine doping: Metal-free defect-induced electrocatalyst for oxygen reduction reaction

Abstract Heteroatom-doping introduces various defects in nanocarbons, herein; we reported salt-assisted synthetic strategy by establishing gas-liquid interface during pyrolysis and explored fluorine enrichment effect on mesoporous N-doped nanocarbons. The F, N co-doped carbon (FNC) performs similar to precious electrocatalysts in terms of onset (0.98 V) and half-wave (0.87 V) potentials under alkaline medium and half-wave potential of 0.78 V vs RHE was observed in acidic medium. F-doping also improves the ORR-pathway by yielding less peroxide production of 2% and also showed good stability of 8000 CV cycles than that of Pt/C. This study not only highlights the insights on the correlation of F, N dual doping and their intrinsic activity but also contributes a new strategy for highly efficient metal-free ORR electrocatalyst by in-situ fabrication of N, F co-doped carbon.