Monodispersed porous flowerlike PtAu nanocrystals as effective electrocatalysts for ethanol oxidation

- The flower-like PtAu catalysts have been prepared via a facile approach.
- The compositions of PtAu nanoflowers can be easily controlled.
- The PtAu catalysts provide ideal electrocatalytic active sites.
- PtAu catalysts exhibit greatly enhanced catalytic activity and stability.

Designing and tuning the bimetallic nanoparticles with desirable morphology and structure can embody them with greatly enhanced electrocatalytic activity and stability towards liquid fuel oxidation. We herein reported a facile one-pot method for the controlled synthesis of monodispersed binary PtAu nanoflowers with abundant exposed surface area. Owing to its fantastic structure, synergistic and electronic effect, such as-prepared PtAu nanoflowers exhibited outstandingly high electrocatalytic activity with the mass activity of 6482 mA mg−1 towards ethanol oxidation, which is 28.3 times higher than that of commercial Pt/C (227 mA mg−1). More interesting, the present PtAu nanoflower catalysts are more stable for the ethanol oxidation reaction in the alkaline with lower current density decay and retained a much higher current density after successive CVs of 500 cycles than that of commercial Pt/C. This work may open a new way for maximizing the catalytic performance of electrocatalysts towards ethanol oxidation by synthesizing shape-controlled alloy nanoparticles with more surface active sites to enhance the performances of direct fuel cells reaction, chemical conversion, and beyond.

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