For many industrial applications such as polymer synthesis and emerging new sustainable technologies like fuel cells and carbon dioxide conversion, nanoparticle-based catalysts are required. Such catalysts are often made of metal, alloy and intermetallic, which exhibit high catalytic properties because of the atomic ordering and strengthened bonding. For catalytic applications, the optimal sizes of nanoparticles are found to be less than 10 nm, preferably 3-5 nm. However, thermodynamically driven phenomenon where nanoparticles sinter into large particles, makes it challenging to retain the optimal size during the synthesis, especially when heat treatment is often required for the formation of intermetallic nanoparticles. Several methods have been proposed to overcome this problem, such as the use of protection layer, porous supports, and electrostatic adsorption to make metal precursors highly dispersive during the synthesis.<br/>Herewith, we present a new synthesis strategy on producing fine PtCo intermetallic nanoparticles on carbon through a facile flash pyrolysis process. Unlike the previous methods, we designed a dynamic pyrolysis process, in which atomically dispersed precursors (ADPs), namely, metal organic framework (MOF), are used based on our recently developed pyrolysis using MOF as the ADP. Under designed reaction conditions, several platinum-based intermetallic nanoparticles including PtZn and PtCo were produced. We found that the PtCo intermetallic nanoparticles produced from this new kinetically controlled strategy were very active towards electrocatalytic reduction of oxygen. In this presentation, I will discuss our mechanistic study on the formation and catalytic properties.

Synthesis of fine Pt-Co intermetallic nanoparticles in high-temperature pyrolysis

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ACS Fall 2022

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