Enhancing the Electrocatalytic Activity of Pt-Pd Catalysts by Introducing Porous Architectures

Improving the electrocatalytic activity of Pt-based catalysts is of great importance for the development of heterogeneous catalysis, fuel cells, and analytical sensors. Herein, we achieve significant enhancement of the catalytic activity of Pt-Pd bimetallic materials towards glucose electrooxidation by introducing porous architectures with three-dimensional dendritic microstructures, which were fabricated insitu on desired substrates through electrochemically reducing precursors along with periodic bubbling caused by the intermittent liberation of hydrogen. The synthesized Pt-Pd materials were characterized by SEM, nitrogen adsorption/desorption, energy dispersive spectroscopy, XRD, inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry, and electrochemical techniques. Encouragingly, an extra-large active surface area of up to 80.8m2g-1 was obtained for the porous Pt-Pd nanostructures, almost 3.8times that of the Pt-Pd alloys prepared by standard electrodeposition techniques. As a result, the synthesized Pt-Pd with porous frameworks exhibited remarkably improved electrocatalytic properties for glucose oxidation in neutral media, with 1.5times the mass activity compared to the conventional Pt-Pd structure. In addition, the porous Pt-Pd catalysts could be reused at least 100times in the presence of chloride ions, with negligible loss of activity.