Recently, Dr. Yan Liting, from the Nano New Energy Team of the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Qilu University of Technology, collaborated with Professor Jianxing Shen, Distinguished Professor Zhao Xuebo of the School of Materials and Professor Wang Lianzhou of the University of Queensland in the international top journal "Advanced Materials" (Top, IF =27.398) published a research paper titled "A Freestanding 3D Heterostructure Film Stitched by MOF-Derived Carbon Nanotube Microsphere Superstructure and Reduced Graphene Oxide Sheets: A Superior Multifunctional Electrode for Overall Water Splitting and Zn-Air Batteries". Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences) is the first unit to complete. This is the first time that Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences) has published a research paper in Advanced Materials as the first unit. Jianxing Shen, Xuebo Zhao and Lianzhou Wang are the co-corresponding authors of the paper , Yan Liting is the first author and corresponding author of the paper.
The development of renewable, safe, clean and sustainable new energy and the required energy storage and conversion technology is currently a global hot topic. Among them, supercapacitors, lithium-ion batteries, metal-air batteries, hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells, electrolysis As a typical energy storage and conversion technology, water has great application potential and research value. The key electrode reactions in the reaction process, such as oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), oxygen evolution reaction (OER), hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), etc., all involve the complex reaction process of the adsorption and dissociation of reaction intermediates on the electrode, so it needs Catalyst to speed up the reaction. Compared with traditional powder catalysts, self-supporting carbon-based membrane materials do not require tedious electrode preparation processes, not only have excellent electrical conductivity, but also provide channels for electron transfer, and their higher specific surface area can also expose more catalysts. Active sites improve the catalytic performance of membrane materials.
The research selected hollow spherical metal organic framework compounds (MOF) as "spacers" and self-sacrificing templates, and used the self-grown carbon nanotube "needles" of MOF to "stitch" the two-dimensional graphene sheets together to construct a Flexible three-dimensional self-supporting porous carbon nanotube graphene composite membrane material. Thanks to the controllability of the metal and organic ligands in the MOF, evenly distributed metal nano-particles and a few layers of nitrogen-doped graphitic carbon "armor" structure can be introduced into the membrane structure. This special nanostructure can not only improve the catalytic activity of the membrane material, but also greatly improve the stability of the membrane material. The method has good universality, can be used for a variety of nanostructured MOF and two-dimensional materials, can be widely used for the synthesis and preparation of a variety of functional membrane materials, and has broad application prospects.