TY - INPR A1 - Rieck, Arielle A1 - Low, Jian Liang A1 - Dietzmann, Simon A1 - Radnik, Jörg A1 - Teimouri, Zahra A1 - Higgins, Drew A1 - Hodoroaba, Vasile-Dan A1 - Mehmood, Asad A1 - Fellinger, Tim-Patrick T1 - Understanding the Activity Trade-Off between Tetrapyrrolic Fe-NCs and Co-NCs in the Alkaline Oxygen Reduction Reaction N2 - A water-free ionothermal synthesis of porous magnesium-imprinted nitrogen-doped carbon (Mg–NC) materials is introduced to prepare a platform material to investigate electrocatalytic structure-performance relations. Atomically dispersed Co- and Fe-NCs isomorphic to the pristine Mg-NCs are prepared by ion-exchange reactions. The current Mg-templating strategy enables relatively high pyrolysis product yields of up to 50 wt% and resultant Fe-NC and Co-NC catalysts contain high and comparable active metal loading of up to 2.52 wt% Fe and 2.29 wt% Co, respectively. A combination of X-ray spectroscopies with DFT studies reveals a tetrapyrrolic structure of the coordination sites, originating from a pyrolytic magnesium template ion reaction within the ionothermal synthesis. Two sets of highly active isomorphic tetrapyrrolic Fe-NCs and Co-NCs are utilized to understand the differences in intrinsic electrocatalytic performance of Co-NCs and Fe-NCs towards the alkaline oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). Despite their superior valence electronic properties to facilitate the initial outer-sphere electron transfer to O2, Co-NCs show significantly lower performance than Fe-NC with comparable loading. Although the generally discussed weaker binding of peroxide intermediates to CoN4 sites compared to FeN4 sites is evident, experimental and theoretical investigation reveal that it is the underlying peroxide oxidation activity that suppresses the oxygen reduction activity of M-NCs. The high peroxide oxidation activity of Co-NCs explains their reduced alkaline ORR relative to Fe-NCs, shedding light on the understated significance of controlling peroxide chemistry for the optimizing cathodic performance. KW - Magnesium Imprinting KW - Tetrapyrrolic Sites KW - Metal- and nitrogen-doped carbon (M-N-C) KW - Oxygen Reduction Reaction (ORR) KW - Nitrogen doped Carbon PY - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-651487 DO - https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv-2025-s59s5 SP - 1 EP - 24 AN - OPUS4-65148 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -