Summary: | Developing a highly stable and non-precious, low-cost, bifunctional electrocatalyst is essential for energy storage and energy conversion devices due to the increasing demand from the consumers. Therefore, the fabrication of a bifunctional electrocatalyst is an emerging focus for the promotion and dissemination of energy storage/conversion devices. Spinel and perovskite transition metal oxides have been widely explored as efficient bifunctional electrocatalysts to replace the noble metals in fuel cell and metal-air batteries. In this work, we developed a bifunctional catalyst for oxygen reduction and oxygen evolution reaction (ORR/OER) study using the mechanochemical route coupling of cobalt oxide nano/microspheres and carbon black particles incorporated lanthanum manganite perovskite (LaMnO<sub>3</sub>@C-Co<sub>3</sub>O<sub>4</sub>) composite. It was synthesized through a simple and less-time consuming solid-state ball-milling method. The synthesized LaMnO<sub>3</sub>@C-Co<sub>3</sub>O<sub>4</sub> composite was characterized by scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) analysis, X-ray diffraction spectroscopy, and micro-Raman spectroscopy techniques. The electrocatalysis results showed excellent electrochemical activity towards ORR/OER kinetics using LaMnO<sub>3</sub>@C-Co<sub>3</sub>O<sub>4</sub> catalyst, as compared with Pt/C, bare LaMnO<sub>3</sub>@C, and LaMnO<sub>3</sub>@C-RuO<sub>2</sub> catalysts. The observed results suggested that the newly developed LaMnO<sub>3</sub>@C-Co<sub>3</sub>O<sub>4</sub> electrocatalyst can be used as a potential candidate for air-cathodes in fuel cell and metal-air batteries.
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