Preparation And Electrochemical Performance Of Pt-ni Alloy Catalyst With Bamboo Charcoal As Support

To deal with the low catalyst activity and high-cost problems on thecatalysts in the direct methanol fuel cell, the bamboo charcoal (BC) wasemployed as the support, the efficiency of Pt/BC and Pt-Ni/BC weresynthesized in this paper. The catalytic mechanism and kinetics of theelectrochemical process were studied.Classic glycol method was employed to prepare the Pt/VulcanXC-72and Pt/BC catalysts, the results showed that the bamboo charcoalhas a higher catalytic activity of Pt catalysts due to the orderedmesoporous structure and high degree of graphitization.On the basis of preparing the Pt catalyst, the sodium borohydridewas used to help glycol to synthesize the Pt-Ni alloy catalysts with theactivated BC as catalyst supports. The high dispersion and small particlesize (3-5nm) alloy nano-catalysts was obtained by adjusting thetemperature and pH of the reaction solution. It showed that the alloy catalyst was fcc structure single-phase solid solution.Electrochemical performance of the catalysts during the acidicmethanol catalytic oxidation process showed that, when the Pt contentwas higher than52.4at%, the catalytic activity of alloy catalysts is higherthan the Pt/BC catalyst, and when the Pt content was at the74.4at%, thecatalyst showed the best. With the increase of Ni composition in the alloycatalysts, the efficiency increased gradually; in addition, The COtolerance ability of alloy catalyst was better than single-metal catalysts,showing a higher stability.In the oxygen reduction performance testing, the catalytic activityhigher than the commercial E-TEK catalyst when the Pt content in thealloy was higher than68.1at%, and Pt87Ni13/BC showed the highestcatalytic activity; So, the Pt-Ni alloy catalyst was not only perform higheractivity, but also decreasing the usage amount of the Pt metal.