Fuel cell have received considerable attention due to their promising applications as sustainable and clean energy sources. Currently, nobel Pt is one of the most popular and extesively used electrocatalysts for the oxidation reaction of fuels such as methanol and formic acid in low-temperature fuel cells. To derease the cost, many efforts have been devoted to alloying Pt with other inexpensive metals, such as Fe, Co, Ni, and Cu, respectively. Very recently, multimetallic alloy catalysts attracted increasing interest, where Pt content and electrocatalytic performance could be further decreased and improved respectively. In this work, ternary alloy CuFePt nanoparticles anchores on the reduced graphene oxide (RGO) sheets have been facilely synthesized by using one-pot strategy in water at room temperture. The as-prepared CuFePt/RGO composites were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The electrochemical tests showed that the RGO sheets supported trimetallic CuFePt nanocatalyst exhibited a highly enhanced electrocatalytic activity, improved durability and tolerance to CO poisoning for methanol and formic acid oxidation reaction, much superior to those of pure Pt, bimetallic CuPt and FePt counterparts (Fig. 1). The composition effect in ternary CuFePt alloy was also examined to obtain the highest electrocatalytic activity. The simple synthesis of CuFrPt hybrids provides a green strategy to developing multimetallic alloy nanocatalysts as low-cost and high-performance electrocatalysts for methanol and formic acid oxidation reaction in fuel cells.

Presenter: Xuan Zhang