Continuous flowing technology for efficient and stable scale‐up production of Pt nanoparticles catalysts in PEMFC

Abstract

A stable scale-up production strategy is necessary to propel high-performance Pt nanoparticles (NPs) catalysts from academic research to industrial applications. Conventional batch-type reactors scale up the production of Pt NPs catalysts by expanding the volume of the reaction vessel, which induces insufficient reaction control due to the limited heat transfer capacity. It can lead to severe agglomeration of Pt NPs and prevent the original high catalytic activity. Here, the continuous flow technology with efficient heat transfer was demonstrated to possess excellent properties of efficient and stable reaction control, which can effectively avoid agglomeration and stably produce Pt NPs catalysts with Pt NPs of uniform size and homogeneous dispersion on carbon supports at various production scales. The results show that the continuous flow technology enables the reaction slurry to reach the equilibrium temperature with a tiny difference (<1 °C) from the preset temperature within 1 min, reducing the reaction time from 4 h in the batch-type reactor to 10 min. The Pt NPs catalyst synthesized by it achieved a performance of 1.32 W cm−2 at 0.6 V, 1.4 times that of the batch-type reactor. It is an ideal solution to promote the rapid industrial application of high-performance Pt NPs catalysts that conduct laboratory synthesis studies of small amounts by the efficient and convenient continuous flow reactor and then use the same continuous flow reactor to perform efficient and stable scale-up production.