The
development of N-doped porous carbon from porous organic polymers
(POPs), especially low-cost hyper-crosslinked polymers (HCPs) provides
an ideal platform for constructing carbon-based metal-free electrocatalysts
with tunable chemical compositions and porous structures. However,
most of the HCPs do not contain nitrogen, which makes it difficult
to fabricate N-doped porous carbon by direct pyrolysis. Herein, a
sort of N-doped hierarchically porous carbon using HCPs as a precursor
is prepared by simple NH3 activation. The key factors affecting
the catalytic performance of the obtained carbon catalysts can be
regularly tuned by the pyrolysis temperature and building blocks,
which results in an optimal catalyst (Py-NHCP-1000) with abundant
nitrogen content, a high surface area (1865 m2 g–1), and rich defects. Remarkably, Py-NHCP-1000 with an outstanding
electrocatalytic performance presents a positive shift of 27 mV for E
1/2 relative to commercial Pt/C, and well durable
and affordable qualities for the oxygen reduction reaction. Therefore,
this work paves an avenue for designing and preparing a kind of affordable
and high-efficiency metal-free electrocatalyst from low-cost and scalable
HCPs and extending it to other energy storage/conversion materials.