Immobilization strategies for carbon electrode materials

Abstract

Carbon electrodes are of great interest in analytical and industrial electrochemistry. In addition, the “classical” carbon materials such as graphite, glassy carbon and carbon black have become decent choices for developing energy materials. The basic advantages of these materials include wide potential windows, inert redox activities, and low cost. Furthermore, the variety of carbon materials has made them more popular for applying carbon electrodes in catalyst support or battery technology. As the recent energy challenges seek more such materials for energy storage or performing fuel-forming reactions, finding strategies to incorporate catalysts into the carbon materials has been a promising research area. These strategies include physical adsorption or chemical grafting between the molecules (or catalysts) of interest and host carbon materials. Although a rich literature showcases the applications of molecules-immobilized carbon electrodes in electrocatalysis, the experimental details for the preparation of the heterogeneous carbon electrodes are typically provided in the Supporting Information documents and often become difficult to find based on web search. In this chapter, we attempt to gather such experimental conditions focusing on the strategies to incorporate molecular electrocatalysts onto carbon surfaces. In addition, we also included the strategies of how carbon materials are used to keep the fundamental ingredients of batteries immobilized to improve battery longevity.