State-of-the-art ORR electrocatalyst concepts

There are a few distinct structural concepts for high-performance Pt alloy ORR electrocatalysts that are currently attracting much attention because they hold the promise of significant activity improvements compared to pure Pt catalysts. As a result of this, these electrocatalysts potentially offer the prospect to impact the future of Polymer Electrolyte Membrane fuel cell catalyst technology. 

The Pt alloy monolayer nanoparticle catalysts (e.g., Pt-Re layer on Pd cores) showed a clearly improved specific (Pt surface normalized) ORR activity their Pt mass-based electrocatalytic activity, however, exceeded that of pure Pt catalysts by an impressive factor of 18 x— 20 x. Their noble metal (Pt, Re, and Pd) mass-based activity improvement was still about a factor 4x. The Tafel slope in the 800-950 mV/RHE range suggested that the surface accumulation of Pt-OH species is delayed on the Pt monolayer catalyst. The enormous increase in Pt mass-based activity is obviously due to the small amount of Pt metal inside the Pt monolayer. 

Computational studies indicated that Pt monolayers on non-Pt substrates exhibit distinct oxygen adsorption and reduction characteristics. In particular, the Pt—OH and Pt— binding energies were predicted to decrease compared to a pure Pt surface. In the light of the previous discussion in Section 4.1.4 of the origin of the overpotential in the ORR reaction, the Pt— reduction process becomes activated at a higher electrode potential compared to pure Pt. 

Pt alloy monolayer catalysts exhibited even more active ORR behavior compared to Pt monolayer catalysts. To understand this phenomenon computational DFT studies were carried out. The hypothesis to be tested was that, for instance, Ru metal atoms in the Pt—Ru monolayer are OH-covered and could inhibit the adsorption of additional OH on neighboring surface sites (adsorbate-adsorbate repulsion effect). A very similar hypothesis was put forward about three years earlier by Paulus et al. [105] who postulated that Co surface atoms might exhibit a so-called common-ion effect, that is, they could repel like species from neighboring sites. A combined computational-experimental study finally confirmed this hypothesis [123] If oxophilic atoms such as Ru or Os were incorporated into the Pt monolayer catalysts, the formation of adjacent surface OH was delayed, if not inhibited. Oxo-phobic atoms, such as Au, displayed the opposite effect, would not inhibit Pt—OH formation, and were found to be detrimental to the overall ORR activity. 

While the stability of the monolayer Pt alloy catalyst concept was initially unclear and therefore threatened to make the monolayer catalyst concept a questionable longer term solution, a very recent discovery seems to lend support to the claim that Pt monolayer catalyst could be made into stable catalyst structures Zhang et al. [94] reported the stabilizing effect of Au clusters when deposited on top of Pt catalysts. The presence of Au clusters resulted in a stable ORR and surface area profile of the catalysts over the course of about 30,000 potential cycles. X-ray absorption studies provided evidence that the presence of the Au clusters modified the Pt oxidation potentials in such a way as to shift the Pt surface oxidation towards higher electrode potentials. 

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