Designing efficient catalysts for the complete ethanol
oxidation
reaction (EOR) remains challenging because of its complex reaction
network, which involves more than 70 reactions of C2 species,
many reactions of C1 species, water dissociation, as well
as reactions leading to by-products. Recently, the promising EOR performance
of the one-atom-thick Ir-rich skin of a bimetallic PtIr electrocatalyst
was illustrated and its further improvement requires a thorough understanding
of the complete EOR mechanism that is still largely lacking. Therefore,
we studied 58 critical elementary reactions of complete EOR including
all three stages of catalysis of ethanol oxidation, i.e., dehydrogenation,
C–C bond cleavage, and CO2 formation, as well as
including water dissociation, on three (100)-exposed layered bimetallic
Pt–Ir catalysts using density functional theory (DFT) calculations.
Based on the activation and reaction energies, we mapped out the mechanisms
of complete EOR on these layered PtIr catalysts. The DFT results demonstrated
that the different C–O coupling abilities of the catalyst plays
a leading role in the complete EOR performance of Pt–Ir catalysts.
We further performed DFT studies on the reactions on a Ir@Pt(100)
surface with about 6% Pt atoms on the Ir layer. The surface Pt atoms
exhibit excellent C–O coupling of C1 species (e.g.,
CO + O → CO2), while the Ir atoms prevent the C–OH
coupling to form CH3COOH (CH3CO + OH →
CH3COOH). Both DFT and kinetics studies indicate that the
Ir@Pt(100) surface with Pt-doped active sites is the best for complete
EOR and is responsible for the experimentally observed high catalytic
performance. This work indicates effective EOR catalysis need to go
beyond single metal catalysts and the core–shell structures
of multimetallic catalysts.