Sophisticated Construction of Hollow Au-Ag-Cu Nanoflowers as Highly Efficient Electrocatalysts toward Ethylene Glycol Oxidation

Direct ethylene glycol fuel cells represent promising advanced portable energy storage and conversion devices, which can be well applied to serve as advanced sustainable energy technology to overcome the formidable challenges of ecological crisis and environmental pollution. However, many drawbacks of the newly established catalysts such as poor corrosion resistance and antipoisoning make them exhibit limited electrocatalytic performances. For addressing these issues, we herein combined both morphological and component advantages to engineer an advanced Au-Ag-Cu trimetallic electrocatayst with fascinating hollow nanoflowers structures. By virtue of such unique structure, the as-obtained Au-Ag-Cu hollow nanoflowers displayed unprecedentedly excellent electrocatalytic activity toward ethylene glycol oxidation with the highest mass activity of 5493.4 mA mg(AU;)(-1) 5.9-fold enhancement than that of pure Au. We postulate that the strategy and electrocatalysts we engineered in this work will greatly boost the commercial development of fuel cell technologies.