On October 30th, the 18th Challenge Cup National Extracurricular Academic and Technological Works Competition for College Students was successfully concluded at Guizhou University. SJTU successfully won the 18th "Challenge Cup" national championship, and won the highest honor of the competition "Challenge Cup" for the sixth time. The people of SJTU once again demonstrated the excellent style of "challenging oneself, scaling the peak, cherishing honor and daring to win".

In this year's Challenge Cup, Wang Yibo, an undergraduate student of F19 in the School of Materials Science and Engineering, won the National Grand Prize for his individual work, "Synergistic crystal field-magnetic field construction and mechanism research of efficient oxygen reduction catalysts for metal-air batteries ", and his team also included Ye Cong, an undergraduate student of F20 in the School of Materials Science and Engineering, and Zeng Hao, an undergraduate student of F21 in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. The instructors of the work are Fu Chaopeng and Sun Baode from the Institute of Solidification Science and Technology.

National Grand Prize project

Synergistic crystal field-magnetic field construction and mechanism research of efficient oxygen reduction catalysts for metal-air batteries

Team members: Wang Yibo, Ye Cong, Zeng Hao

Instructors: Fu Chaopeng, Sun Baode

Project description: Iron (Fe) single-atom catalysts have good catalytic activity for oxygen reduction and are strong candidates for anode catalytic materials for fuel cells and metal-air batteries. However, the oxygen adsorption of Fe single atoms is too weak during the oxygen reduction process, which hinders the further enhancement of the activity. Due to the spin-related oxygen catalytic properties of Fe single atomic sites, adjusting the spin structure of the 3d orbitals of Fe single atoms can optimize the oxygen adsorption and improve the catalytic activity. In this study, we propose a "crystal field-magnetic field synergistic strategy" to regulate the spin structure of Fe single atoms, and use a series of electrochemical in-situ spectroscopy combined with density functional theory calculations to elucidate the spin-dependent oxygen catalytic mechanism and realize the enhancement of the catalytic activity of Fe single-atom catalysts for oxygen reduction. This work provides theoretical guidance for the rational design of high-performance Fe single-atom catalysts and contributes to the development of fuel cells and metal-air batteries. The first project leader, Wang Yibo, F19 undergraduate student, has published one paper in Angewandte Chemie and one paper in Chemical Engineering Journal as an independent first author.