Nanostructured Carbon Electrocatalysts for Energy Conversions

The growing energy demand worldwide has led to increased use of fossil fuels. This, in turn, is making fossil fuels dwindle faster and cause more negative environmental impacts. Thus, alternative, environmentally friendly energy sources such as fuel cells and electrolyzers are being developed. While significant progress has already been made in this area, such energy systems are still hard to scale up because of their noble metal catalysts. In this concept paper, first, various scalable nanocarbon-based electrocatalysts that are being synthesized for energy conversions in these energy systems are introduced. Next, notable heteroatom-doping and nanostructuring strategies that are applied to produce different nanostructured carbon materials with high electrocatalytic activities for energy conversions are discussed. The concepts used to develop such materials with different structures and large density of dopant-based catalytic functional groups in a sustainable way, and the challenges therein, are emphasized in the discussions. The discussions also include the importance of various analytical, theoretical, and computational methods to probe the relationships between the compositions, structures, dopants, and active catalytic sites in such materials. These studies, coupled with experimental studies, can further guide innovative synthetic routes to efficient nanostructured carbon electrocatalysts for practical, large-scale energy conversion applications.