Partially Oxidized Bimetallic Nanocrystals as Efficient Non‐Noble Metal Alcohol Electrooxidation Catalysts

Abstract

AbstractAlthough extensive efforts have been devoted to pursuing active nanomaterials for fuel cell reactions, they still suffer from serious structure changes and loss of active sites during the electrocatalysis. Herein, we have successfully constructed bimetallic Cu−Ni nanocrystals with unique yolk‐shell architecture via partial oxidation, which can largely release the particle expansion and effectively prevent the particle from aggregation and dissolution during the electrocatalysis. As a consequent, the optimized Cu−Ni yolk‐shell electrocatalyst delivers excellent durability with only 19.6 % activity decay after 10 h‐methanol oxidation reaction (MOR), in contrast with that of the commercial Pt/C (96.0 %), and can even maintain 62.6 % activity after long‐term MOR (5 days). XPS analysis indicates that the large downshift of d‐band center of Cu−Ni yolk‐shell electrocatalyst leads to the release of “poison effect” for enhancing the alcohol electrooxidation. The present work provides a new approach for achieving low‐cost catalysts with ultrahigh stability for electrooxidation and beyond.