MoNP‐doped Defective Carbon Fibers with Bark‐like Nanosurface as Effective Bifunctional Electrocatalysts for Zn‐air Batteries

Abstract The flexible air electrode with high oxygen electrocatalytic performance and outstanding stability under various deformations plays a vital role in high‐performance flexible Zn‐air batteries (ZABs). Herein, a self‐supported Mo, N, and P co‐doped carbon cloth (CC) denoted as MoNP@CC with bark‐like surface structure is fabricated by a facile two‐step approach via a one‐pot method and pyrolysis. The surface of the electrode shows a nanoscale “rift valley” and uniformly distributed active sites. Taking advantage of the nano‐surface as well as transition metal and heteroatom doping, the self‐supported electrocatalysis air electrode exhibits considerable oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) performance in terms of low overpotential (388 mV at 10 mA cm −2 ) for OER and a much positive potential (0.74 V) at 1.0 mA cm −2 for ORR. Furthermore, MoNP@CC is further used for the flexible ZAB to demonstrate its practical application. The MoNP@CC‐based ZAB displays a good cycling performance for 2800 min and an open‐circuit voltage of 1.44 V. This work provides a new approach to the construction of a high‐performance, self‐supported electrocatalysis electrode used for a flexible energy storage device.