4.7 Article

Ultrathin PtxSn1-x Nanowires for Methanol and Ethanol Oxidation Reactions: Tuning Performance by Varying Chemical Composition

Journal

ACS APPLIED NANO MATERIALS
Volume 1, Issue 3, Pages 1104-1115

Publisher

AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acsanm.7b00289

Keywords

fuel cell; PtSn; ultrathin nanowires; methanol oxidation reaction; ethanol oxidation reaction; electrocatalysis; alloys

Funding

  1. U.S. Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division
  2. U.S. Department of Energy [DE-SC-00112704]

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Pt-based alloys denote promising catalysts for the methanol oxidation reaction (MOR) and the ethanol oxidation reaction (EOR), due to their enhanced activity toward alcohol-oxidation reactions and reduced cost as compared with Pt alone. Among all of these binary systems, PtSn has been reported to exhibit superior methanol/ethanol oxidation activity. In this study, we deliberatively tailor chemical composition, reduce size, and optimize morphology of the catalyst in an effort to understand structure-property correlations that can be used to improve upon the electrocatalytic activity of 0,4 these systems. Previous work performed by our group suggested that Pt-based catalysts, possessing an ultrathin one-dimensional (1D) structure, dramatically promote both cathodic and anodic reactions with respect to their zero-dimensional (OD) counterparts. Herein, a novel set of ultrathin binary Pt-Sn 1D nanowire (NW) catalysts with rationally controlled chemical compositions, i.e., Pt9Sn1, Pt(8)Sn(2, )and Pt7Sn3, has been synthesized using a facile, room- temperature, wet-solution-based method. The crystallinity and chemical composition of these as-prepared samples were initially characterized using XRD, XPS, and EDX. Results revealed that this synthetic protocol could successfully generate PtSn alloys with purposely tunable chemical compositions. TEM and HRTEM verified the structural integrity of our ultrathin 1D NW morphology for our Pt9Sn1, Pt8Sn2, and Pt7Sn3 samples. The effects of varying Sn content within these alloy samples toward the electro-oxidation reaction of methanol and ethanol were probed using cyclic voltammetry (CV) in acidic media. Within this series, we find that the optimized chemical composition for both the MOR and the EOR is Pt7Sn3.

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