Antiperovskite Nitrides CuNCoV: Highly Efficient and Durable Electrocatalysts for the Oxygen-Evolution Reaction.

Perovskite oxides have attracted much attention for enabling the oxygen-evolution reaction (OER) over the past decades. Nevertheless, their poor conductivity is still a barrier hindering their use. Herein, we report a catalyst prototype of Co-based antiperovskite nitrides CuNCoV (0 ≤ ≤ 1) to be a highly effective OER electrocatalyst. The synthesized CuNCoV exhibits greatly enhanced activity and stability toward the OER in alkaline medium. The CuNCoV shows a mere 235 mV of overpotential to reach 10 mA cm, which is comparable to that of Ir/C (232 mV). More importantly, the CuNCoV is more durable than the conventional Ir/C catalyst. The CuNCoV catalyst enabled a Zn-air battery to exhibit a cycle life of 143 h with a much higher cell efficiency. The V-substituted CuNCoV provides a higher content of the desirable Co species in the post-OER catalyst, which ensures a high activity over a long-term operation. With these enhanced effects enabled by the compositional flexibility of CuNCoV antiperovskite nitride, a feasible strategy for optimizing an electrocatalyst with tunable properties is provided.