Sustainable and efficient energy conversion processes requires materials that are designed to be high-performance and durable, yet cost-effective.  In electrochemical technologies such as fuel cells and electrolyzers, commercial success in acid-based polymer electrolyte membrane devices now motivates the development of next-generation technologies based entirely on non-precious metal catalysts. To enable non-precious metal catalyst materials, these devices will likely need to be operated under alkaline conditions (i.e., high pH). A primary challenge in moving to non-precious metal catalysts is the ability to maintain activity and stability metrics that are competitive with precious metal catalysts. There continues to be an opportunity to use nanostructured and nanosized particles to simultaneously address the need for improved selectivity, activity, and stability in alkaline reactive environments. Our research interests in this area focus on the development of bimetallic nanoparticles for oxidative electrochemical reactions such as the oxygen evolution reaction and alternative fuel oxidation.  We develop nanoparticle materials for specific electrochemical or chemical reactions through variation of bimetallic composition, morphological structure, extent of oxide/oxyhydroxide phases, and ligand concentration and molecular structure. Recent work in the field of alkaline electrocatalysis has demonstrated that key bimetallic non-precious metal oxide/hydroxide compositions, including FeNi and FeCo, are some of the most active for reactions such as fuel oxidation and oxygen evolution during water electrolysis.  In this talk, I will discuss some of our on-going work on an iron-nickel oxide nanoparticle material that demonstrates promising performance for both water electrolysis and methanol oxidation. In particular, I will discuss how the use of x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) in both ex situ and in situ experimental setups has allowed us to probe the structure of these catalysts in depth and develop a more detailed structural understanding of the materials. In our work, and with the use of XAS, we demonstrate that we are able to synthesize in nanoparticle form a bimetallic hydroxide phase that matches the most active phase identified in thin film catalysts.<br/>

X-ray absoprtion spectroscopy characterization of bimetallic iron-nickel nanoparticle electrocatalysts

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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