Abstract
Here we report the synthesis of 9 nm Ni(OH)2 decorated Pt-Cu octahedra (Ni(OH)2-PtCu) in one-pot synthesis for ethanol oxidation reaction (EOR) electrocatalysis in acidic electrolyte. To prepare Ni(OH)2-PtCu octahedra, CO gas was directly introduced in a reaction process as selective capping agents on the PtCu(111) facet. Ni(OH)2 was naturally deposited on the Pt-Cu octahedra during the synthesis. Carbon supported Ni(OH)2-PtCu (Ni(OH)2-PtCu/C) as an EOR catalyst showed enhanced CO tolerance due to the existence of oxophilic Ni(OH)2 on the surface of Pt-Cu, facilitating water dissolution to produce OH adsorption and to promote complete CO oxidation to CO2. In addition, Pt-Cu alloy composition also showed improvement of CO tolerance because of modified d-band structure of the Pt atoms, thereby weakening the binding strength of CO on the catalysts. Therefore, the Ni(OH)2-PtCu/C showed enhanced EOR activity and durability compared to the Pt-Cu octahedra and commercial Pt/C counterparts.
Highlights
Direct alcohol fuel cell (DAFC) for numerous applications has attracted huge attention due to its high efficiency under ambient operating conditions (Xu and Zhang, 2014; Ozoemena, 2016)
Transition metals released from metal carbonyls complicate the synthesis system, making it difficult to identify the formation mechanism of shape-controlled nanocrystals (Chang et al, 2017)
High-resolution Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) (HRTEM) image of a single Ni(OH)2PtCu octahedron shows that the d-spacing for adjacent Pt lattice fringes measured from a few different sites was 0.222 nm, which is smaller than that of Pt{111} planes (0.227 nm) of face-centered cubic bulk (Figure 1B) (Choi et al, 2013)
Summary
Direct alcohol fuel cell (DAFC) for numerous applications has attracted huge attention due to its high efficiency under ambient operating conditions (Xu and Zhang, 2014; Ozoemena, 2016). These results indicated that the surface modification of alloy catalyst with oxidation form of transition metals such as Ni(OH)x activates water dissociation and provides OHads at lower potentials than Pt (Cui et al, 2013a; Erini et al, 2015).
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