Production of Hydrogen by Water Splitting Using Synthesized Porous Pt-Pd Nanodendrites for Energy Applications

Abstract

The continual increase in world population and lifestyle standards has led to a seminal growth in global energy consumption amounting to about 90% of global energy as fossil fuels supply the transportation and industrial sectors. This led to high emission of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, resulting in a substantial depletion of carbon-based resources that could be otherwise used to produce valuable chemicals. In 2013, worldwide energy consumption was 17 TW and is expected to at least double by 2050. This research studied the rational design of porous binary Pt-based nanodendrites as an efficient catalytic system for electrochemical driven water splitting for energy production. Porous Pt-Pd nanodendrites were typically synthesized by the reduction of the metal precursors by L-ascorbic acid (AA) in the presence of PVP as a structure-directing agent under ultrasonication. The Platinum-Palladium (Pt-Pd) was used as a catalyst in water splitting technique for hydrogen production and compared with commercial Pt/C catalyst. Several tests were done on the samples including Cyclic Voltammetry (CV), Linear Sweep Voltammetry (LSV), IT, ET to measure the energy rate and the characterization at the last step.