Abstract
In the fabrication of direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs) having high performance the essential conditions are (i) the design and construction of a suitable anode electrocatalyst comprising of Pt or a Pt based alloy nanoparticles methanol oxidation reaction (MOR) efficiently and effectively (ii) nature of support materials onto which these nanoparticles are anchored. In MOR one of the major problems is the adsorption of poisoneous carbonmoxide and other similar intermediates near the active surface of Pt active leading to its deactivation and also the crossover of methanol solution towards the cathodic side. All these factors, therefore, lower the overall electrochemical performance of the electro-catalysts. In the present review paper we report some of our important results of the synthesis of different Pt and Pt based anode electro-catalysts (Pt, PtCo alloys, PtCu alloys) anchored on different support materials such as reduced graphene oxide (rGO), Nitrogen doped rGO and a hybrid of rGO/CNTs for MOR and compared with few of those already reported recently. A detailed characterization of raw materials and the electro-catalysts synthesized in this work is also discussed using XRD, FT-IR, SEM, TEM etc. The electrochemical measurements were made using cyclic voltammetry in acidic medium at room temperature.
Highlights
In the last few years much attention has been paid on the development of direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs) because of their use as power source in many of electronic devices including mobile phones, laptop and other applications [1,2]
It was observed that the Faradaic efficiency at 2 M CH3OH is much higher (46%) for the assynthesized PtCo/reduced graphene oxide (rGO) electrocatalyst in comparison to that observed for commercial Pt/C at this methanol concentration.beyond a methanol concentration of 5 M the Faradaic efficiency of the as-synthesized PtCo/rGO catalyst is found to decrease from 60 to only 6% at 6 M, which may be explained by the fact at methanol concentration higher than 5 M, no more active Pt sites are available for methanol electron oxidation (MOR) due to their saturation
We have studied the electro-oxidation of methanol using various anode electrocatalysts in which Pt and Pt based alloy nanoparticles specially PtCo and PtCu is different molar ratio were supported them on rGO, NrGO and a hybrid of rGO and carbon nanotubes (CNTs)
Summary
In the last few years much attention has been paid on the development of direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs) because of their use as power source in many of electronic devices including mobile phones, laptop and other applications [1,2]. The other challenges in the development of these DMFCs are to increase their electrochemical stability, high efficiency and to provide a high-power density These challenges are usually met by fabricating a anode comprising of Pt or Pt-based deposited homogeneously on nanostructured materials including carbon [3,4], multiwalled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) [510], carbon nanofibers (CNFs) [11,12], reduced graphene oxide (rGO) [13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26], expanded graphite [27,28], graphitic form of carbon nitride (g-C3N4) [29,30,31,32] and nitrogendoped rGO or CNTs [33,34,35,36,37] etc. The possible reactions taking place during the MOR are shown in Fig. 1 as recently reported [61]
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