Origins, developments, and perspectives of carbon nitride-based electrocatalysts for application in low-temperature FCs

This article presents the key features and requirements of oxygen reduction reaction electrocatalysts, and provides a detailed overview of carbon nitride (CN) based electrocatalysts for low-temperature fuel cells. CN-based ECs are composed of a carbon-based matrix embedding nitrogen atoms and selected variants show very high catalytic activity towards the oxygen reduction reaction and high tolerance towards the oxidizing conditions typical at the cathodes of low-temperature fuel cells. The article presents a description of the proper nomenclature of CN based electrocatalysts, provides a detailed overview of the literature in this field to date, and describes in detail the important methods used to prepare CN electrocatalysts. The effect of nitrogen content on the properties and accessibility of the CN electrocatalysts is discussed. The concept of core-shell CN-based electrocatalysts is introduced and described in detail.