With the coming of energy crisis and global environmental pollution, developing clean substantial energy has become the key for solving a serial of problems of energy and environment. Due to their lightweight, highly efficient and eco-friendly properties, polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) have been thought to be a promising candidate. Platinum-based materials are usually used in both cathodes and anodes of fuel cells, especially for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) at the cathodes; however, their large overpotential, high price and scarcity severely obstruct the practical application. Therefore, replacement of platinum-based materials with non-precious-metal catalysts, which are of low cost, high catalytic activity, and robust, has become one of the key issues for the realization of mass applications of PEMFCs.

Recently,Professor WANG Danfrom Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IPE-CAS)and Professor TANG Zhiyong from National Center for Nanoscience and Technology (NCNST) have developed a novel strategy to prepare the carbon supported metalloporphyrin catalysts (Figure 1), in which the molecular architecture of the cobalt porphyrin multilayers is incorporated onto the reduced graphene oxide (rGO) sheets using the layer-by-layer (LBL) assembly technique. Using this method, they can control the structure, thickness, and uniformity of the cobalt porphyrin catalysts on the surface of the rGO sheets at the molecular level, leading to maximization of the catalytic activity for ORR. In addition, by incorporating the graphene as the catalysts substrate, the stability and the methanol tolerance have greatly improved.

The research may open up a new avenue for the development of non-precious-metal ORR catalysts with low-cost and high-performance based on the structure design and manipulation in the molecular level. This work has been recently published inAngewandte Chemie-International Edition（Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2013, 52, 5585-5589.）.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21025310, 91027011, 21031005, 91122014), and the National Research Fund for Fundamental Key Project (2009CB930401).

Figure 1. The scheme of synthesis of the reduced graphene oxides supported metalloporphyrin catalysts

Email: danwang@mail.ipe.ac.cn

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201300711/abstract