Interface engineering of transition metal-nitrogen-carbon by graphdiyne for boosting the oxygen reduction/evolution reactions: A computational study

Exploring high-efficiency electrocatalysts to boost the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is pivotal to the large-scale applications for clean and renewable energy technologies, such as fuel cells, water splitting, and metal-air batteries. Herein, by means of density functional theory (DFT) computations, we proposed a strategy to modulate the catalytic activity of transition metal-nitrogen-carbon catalysts through their interface engineering with graphdiyne (TMNC/GDY). Our results revealed that these hybrid structures exhibit good stability and excellent electrical conductivity. Especially, CoNC/GDY was identified as a promising bifunctional catalyst for ORR/OER with rather low overpotentials in acidic conditions according to the constant-potential energy analysis. Moreover, the volcano plots were established to describe the activity trend of the ORR/OER on TMNC/GDY using the adsorption strength of the oxygenated intermediates. Remarkably, the d-band center and charge transfer of the TM active sites can be utilized to correlate the ORR/OER catalytic activity and their electronic properties. Our findings not only suggested an ideal bifunctional oxygen electrocatalyst, but also provided a useful strategy to obtain highly efficient catalysts by interface engineering of two-dimensional heterostructures.