Reduced Graphene Oxide Based Non Precious Catalysts for Oxygen Reduction Reaction in Low Temperature Fuel Cell Applications

Abstract

The depletion of petroleum based energy resources, climate change and increasing population are the severe challenges to the world, so an immediate solution is needed for sustainable and environmental friendly energy sources. Fuel cell technologies are highly desirable to meet urgent requirement of clean and sustainable energy. The low temperature fuel cells of proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC), Alkaline fuel cell (AFC) and direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) technologies have great interest due to lower operating temperature, high energy conversion efficiency and environmentally benign. These low temperature fuel cells are used in mobile and stationary applications. The key factor for determining the efficiency of the fuel cell is oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) at cathode side, which is slow. The state-of-art Platinum electrocatalysts are suffers from high cost and scarcity. Therefore, an alternative electocatalyst is required to replace platinum, which must be a low cost and earth abundant material. In this research work, rGO based non-metal and non-precious metal catalyst for oxygen reduction reaction in alkaline fuel cells was prepared and studied their physico-chemical properties and analyzed their electrocatalytic performance of towards ORR newline