Fuel cell technology, with high energy conversion efficiency, is considered as one of the most promising technology to replace traditional heat engine in transportation. Pt-based alloy and intermetallic have been intensively studied as electrocatalysts for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). Alloying a second metal with Pt can alter the binding strength of reactants, intermediates, products, and thus improve the performance of fuel cell catalysts and reduce the Pt usage. Compared with alloys which have different atoms randomly dispersed, intermetallic compounds provide a better platform to establish the correlation between surface structure and reaction activity due to their ordered crystal structure. However, making small and monodisperse intermetallic nanoparticles are difficult due to the unavoidable aggregation induced by the high-temperature treatment required for the formation of the intermetallic phase. We used a ship-in-a-bottle strategy to encapsulate nanoparticles with a thermally stable inorganic shell that could prevent the aggregation of particles at high-temperature annealing. Using this strategy, we synthesized sub-4 nm intermetallic nanoparticles which showed dramatically enhanced specific and mass activity in electrocatalytic oxidation reaction.<br/>

Synthesizing intermetallic nanoparticle catalysts for enhanced catalytic electro-oxidation

2019 Fall National Meeting

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