A clicking confinement strategy to fabricate transition metal single-atom sites for bifunctional oxygen electrocatalysis

Rechargeable zinc-air batteries call for high-performance bifunctional oxygen electrocatalysts. Transition metal single-atom catalysts constitute a promising candidate considering their maximum atom efficiency and high intrinsic activity. However, the fabrication of atomically dispersed transition metal sites is highly challenging, creating a need for for new design strategies and synthesis methods. Here, a clicking confinement strategy is proposed to efficiently predisperse transitional metal atoms in a precursor directed by click chemistry and ensure successful construction of abundant single-atom sites. Concretely, cobalt-coordinated porphyrin units are covalently clicked on the substrate for the…