Direct Growth of Highly Strained Pt Islands on Branched Ni Nanoparticles for Improved Hydrogen Evolution Reaction Activity

Abstract

The direct growth of Pt islands on lattice mismatched Ni nanoparticles is a major synthetic challenge and a promising strategy to create highly strained Pt atoms for electrocatalysis. By using very mild reaction conditions, Pt islands with tunable strain were formed directly on Ni branched particles. The highly strained 1.9 nm Pt-island on branched Ni nanoparticles exhibited high specific activity and the highest mass activity for HER in pH 13 electrolyte. These results show the ability to synthetically tune the size of the Pt islands to control the strain to give higher HER activity.

Platinum Atoms and Nanoparticles Embedded Porous Carbons for Hydrogen Evolution Reaction

“…[33,34], controlling the morphology with special size and shape (sphere, cube, polyhedron, nanowire, nanorod, nanotube, etc.) [35][36][37][38][39], diminishing the geometric size from submicron to nano-scale or even down to single atom level, etc. [40][41][42].…”

Faceted Branched Nickel Nanoparticles with Tunable Branch Length for High‐Activity Electrocatalytic Oxidation of Biomass

“…[1][2][3][4][5]18] Ni metal typically adopts the fcc crystal structure; however, methods for forming nanoscale Ni adopting the metastable hcp crystal phase have recently been developed. [19][20][21] Based on the hcp crystal structure of Ni, an opportunity arises for a cubic-core hexagonal-branch mechanism to synthesize 3D branched nanoparticles with the uniformity needed for high-performance catalysis.…”

In situ Engineering of Hollow Porous Mo2C@C Nanoballs Derived From Giant Mo-Polydopamine Clusters as Highly Efficient Electrocatalysts for Hydrogen Evolution

“…The hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) process is regarded as a best available strategy for producing high-purity hydrogen from abundant water Jia et al, 2020). Platinum (Pt) and its alloys are commonly considered as benchmark catalysts for the HER, but the high cost largely impedes its commercial applications (Alinezhad et al, 2019;Park et al, 2019;Jia et al, 2020). Recently, earth-abundant catalysts, especially 3d transition metal compounds, have been reported (Li et al, 2017(Li et al, , 2018Zhu et al, 2020.…”