Porous Graphene Nanoarchitectures: An Efficient Catalyst for Low Charge-Overpotential, Long Life, and High Capacity Lithium–Oxygen Batteries

The electrochemical performance of lithium–oxygen (Li–O2) batteries awaits dramatic improvement in the design of porous cathode electrodes with sufficient spaces to accommodate the discharge products and discovery of effective cathode catalysts to promote both oxygen reduction reactions and oxygen evolution reactions. Herein, we report the synthesis of porous graphene with different pore size architectures as cathode catalysts for Li–O2 batteries. Porous graphene materials exhibited significantly higher discharge capacities than that of nonporous graphene. Furthermore, porous graphene with pore diameter around 250 nm showed the highest discharge capacity among the porous graphene with the small pores (about 60 nm) and large pores (about 400 nm). Moreover, we discovered that addition of ruthenium (Ru) nanocrystals to porous graphene promotes the oxygen evolution reaction. The Ru nanocrystal-decorated porous graphene exhibited an excellent catalytic activity as cathodes in Li–O2 batteries with a high reversible capacity of 17 700 mA h g–1, a low charge/discharge overpotential (about 0.355 V), and a long cycle life up to 200 cycles (under the curtaining capacity of 1000 mAh g–1). The novel porous graphene architecture inspires the development of high-performance Li–O2 batteries.