General and Ultrafast Photothermal Synthesis of Atomic Metal‐Nitrogen‐Carbon Catalysts for H2O2 Electrosynthesis

Abstract Atomic metal‐nitrogen‐carbon catalysts (M‐N‐Cs) are promising electrocatalysts for the two‐electron oxygen reduction reaction (2e − ORR) for the green production of H 2 O 2 . However, the conventional synthetic methods of M‐N‐Cs typically suffer from prolonged possessing time and high energy consumption. Herein, a flash light irradiation‐assisted transient pyrolysis strategy is reported for the rapid and facile synthesis of a Co‐N‐C catalyst consisting of atomic Co‐N 4 sites supported on graphene. The resultant Co‐N‐C is highly active and selective as an electrocatalyst for the 2e − ORR, with a H 2 O 2 selectivity up to 94.2%, high mass activity of 113.9 A g −1 , high turnover frequency of 34.8 s −1 , and an average H 2 O 2 production rate of 12.1 mol g −1 h −1 with an accumulated H 2 O 2 concentration up to 15.2 mmol L −1 when evaluated with a three‐phase flow cell setup. Additionally, this synthetic strategy can be readily expanded to prepare other types of M‐N‐Cs (M = Fe, Ni, Cu, and noble metal Ir) with similar M‐N 4 configurations by simply changing the metal precursors, demonstrating the generality of this method. The rapid and general flash‐assisted synthetic strategy for M‐N‐Cs can provide a readily accessible material library and platform for investigating their catalytic properties in different energy conversion processes.