Nanopores array of ordered mesoporous carbons determine Pt's activity towards alcohol electrooxidation

Abstract

A nanopores array in ordered mesoporous materials matters significantly to the reactant molecules arriving at the active catalytic sites in the interior of the nanostructure. However, how this effect works in the case of electrocatalysis needs investigating. We present that the nanopores array of carbon supports plays a significant role in determining Pt's accessibility and electroactivity. The ordered mesoporous carbons with interconnected pore channels (CMK-3) provide Pt nanoparticles with more than one order of magnitude superior Pt utilization efficiency and alcohol electrooxidation activity to those with isolated pore channels by carbon wall . This becomes more prominent in the case of the electrooxidation of isopropanol with a bigger molecular size and lower polarization. These findings indicate the significant role of nanoarchitectures in Pt's accessibility and electroactivity. It is possible to extend this concept to the other fine chemistry typical of surface activity and facile mass transport of molecules.

One Step Synthesis of a Gold/Ordered Mesoporous Carbon Composite Using a Hard Template Method for Electrocatalytic Oxidation of Methanol and Colorimetric Determination of Glutathione

“…29 The broadness of the peak appeared for C–O bonds owing to the presence of both C=O and C–OH as reported previously. 29…”

“…The highly active porous surface area of OMC along with the homogeneous dispersion of AuNPs provide a faster mass-transfer route which increases the electroactivity of isopropanol despite having higher molecular mass and low polarity. 39…”

Investigation on the coordination mechanism of Pt-containing species and qualification of the alkaline content during Pt/C preparation via a solvothermal polyol method

“…As shown in Fig. 10, it can be observed that the TG curves of these two catalysts is almost the same, carbon and light H2O in the catalyst is almost completely removed when the heating temperature in air gets to 500 °C, and the proportion of the re-maining Pt is very close to the theoretical loading of 20 wt% [40,41].…”

Synthesis and Electrocatalytic Performance of Multi-Component Nanoporous PtRuCuW Alloy for Direct Methanol Fuel Cells

“…The characteristics are typical to multi-component alloys [7,27,32,36,37]. Normally, the electrochemically active surface area (ECSA) can be obtained from the equation ECSAPt (m 2 /g) = QH/(2.1 × mPt) by integrating the hydrogen ad/desorption charge and using the value of 2.1 C m −2 for the oxidation of a monolayer of hydrogen on a polycrystalline Pt electrode [35,38] Figure 3b, the specific activity of the np-PtRuCuW is 1.8 mA cm −2 , which is 3.6 and 2.9 times that of the PtC and PtRu catalysts (0.5 and 0.63 mA cm ). It can be seen that the peak potentials are comparable for all catalysts while the ratio of the forward anodic peak current density (If) to the reverse anodic peak current density (Ib) is different.…”