Solid-State Ball-Milling of Co3O4 Nano/Microspheres and Carbon Black Endorsed LaMnO3 Perovskite Catalyst for Bifunctional Oxygen Electrocatalysis

Abstract

Developing a highly stable and non-precious, low-cost, bifunctional electrocatalyst is essential for energy storage and energy conversion devices due to the increasing demand from the consumers. Therefore, the fabrication of a bifunctional electrocatalyst is an emerging focus for the promotion and dissemination of energy storage/conversion devices. Spinel and perovskite transition metal oxides have been widely explored as efficient bifunctional electrocatalysts to replace the noble metals in fuel cell and metal-air batteries. In this work, we developed a bifunctional catalyst for oxygen reduction and oxygen evolution reaction (ORR/OER) study using the mechanochemical route coupling of cobalt oxide nano/microspheres and carbon black particles incorporated lanthanum manganite perovskite (LaMnO3@C-Co3O4) composite. It was synthesized through a simple and less-time consuming solid-state ball-milling method. The synthesized LaMnO3@C-Co3O4 composite was characterized by scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) analysis, X-ray diffraction spectroscopy, and micro-Raman spectroscopy techniques. The electrocatalysis results showed excellent electrochemical activity towards ORR/OER kinetics using LaMnO3@C-Co3O4 catalyst, as compared with Pt/C, bare LaMnO3@C, and LaMnO3@C-RuO2 catalysts. The observed results suggested that the newly developed LaMnO3@C-Co3O4 electrocatalyst can be used as a potential candidate for air-cathodes in fuel cell and metal-air batteries.