Mesoporous Pd@M (M=Pt, Au) microrods as excellent electrocatalysts for methanol oxidation

Abstract

Coordination chemistry offers a ‘bottom-up’ route to synthesize complex structures from simple components with a nanoscale precision, while galvanic replacement has been proved as a versatile and powerful tool for programmable construction of the multidimensional nanomaterials. In this paper, we first present a facile approach to the preparation of palladium-based organometallics by using dimethyl sulfoxide as the unconventional organic ligands, which leads to the formation of (AcO)2–Pd–(DMSO)2 microrods with well-defined morphology. A sequential heat treatment combining with galvanic replacement provides access to hierarchically nanostructured mesoporous Pd, Pd@Au and Pd@Pt catalysts, which can be used as excellent electrocatalysts with high activity and stability in methanol oxidation. We anticipate that this coordination-thermal decomposition-galvanic replacement coupled strategy will provide a general route to the manufacture of sophisticated bimetallic catalysts bearing three-dimensionally mesoporous features on the nanometer scale.