Surface Characterization and Platinum-like Electrocatalytic Activity of Nano-Scale Platinum Deposited on Transition Metal Carbide Nanotubes via Atomic Layer Deposition

Abstract

This work focuses on a new class of electrocatalyst fabrication in which phase pure β-molybdenum carbide (referred to as Mo2C hereafter) was synthesized into hollow nanotubes and subsequently modified with nanoscale platinum (Pt) particles (1-5 nm) deposited via rotary Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) (referred to as Pt/Mo2C). Pt has been deposited on Mo2C with 15, 50 and 100 ALD cycles. Strong interaction between Pt and Mo2C was observed by XPS and HRTEM. In this paper, we focus on presenting comparison of eletrochemical and surface characterization data among three ALD cycles (100, 50 and 15) to elucidate how performance of the resulting co-catalyst can be tuned by the easily tunable ALD process parameter, number of ALD cycles.