Zeng Jie, Professor of University of science and technology of China, and his collaborators have made important progress in the research of cathode catalysts for PEMFC

Recently, Zeng Jie, Professor of the school of chemistry and materials science of the University of science and technology of China and the research group of Hefei National Research Center for micro scale material science, cooperated with Huang Hongwen, Professor of Hunan University, to develop a cathode catalyst for proton exchange membrane fuel cell with excellent catalytic activity and stability This achievement was published on J am Chem SOC (2018, 140, 16159-16167) under the title of "one nanometer thick ptnirh trimetal nanowires with enhanced oxygen reduction electrocatalys in acid media: integrating multiple advantages into one catalyst" Proton exchange membrane fuel cell has the advantages of zero emission, high energy efficiency, adjustable power and so on It is the most ideal driving power in the future electric vehicles, and has a broad market prospect However, the kinetics of oxygen reduction at the cathode end of PEMFC is very slow A large number of platinum nano catalysts need to be used as electrode catalysts to maintain the efficient operation of PEMFC, which makes the cost of PEMFC very high and limits its large-scale commercial application Therefore, it is of great significance to reduce the amount of platinum used in PEMFC In the platinum based catalyst, the way to reduce the amount of precious metal platinum is to improve the quality activity and catalytic stability of platinum based catalyst in oxygen reduction reaction At present, many reported platinum based catalysts have excellent quality activity, but the stability of most of them is not significant This is because the structure of high quality activity can not be stable in thermodynamics, so it is very challenging to develop platinum based catalysts with high quality activity and excellent stability In the face of this problem, the researchers have developed a ultrafine platinum nickel rhodium ternary metal nanowire catalyst by carefully adjusting the dimension, size and composition of the platinum based catalyst As the diameter of the nanowire is only one nanometer, the ratio of platinum atoms on the surface of the nanowire to the total platinum atoms is higher than 50%, which shows a super high atom utilization rate, providing a structural basis for high catalytic mass activity The results show that the mass activity of the catalyst is 15.2 times higher than that of the commercial catalyst At the same time, only 12.8% of the mass activity of Carbon Loaded Pt / C nanowire catalyst was lost after it was recycled for 10000 times in oxygen atmosphere, while the mass activity energy loss of commercial Pt / C catalyst reached 73.7% after it was recycled for 10000 times in oxygen atmosphere Compared with the commercial platinum carbon nanowire catalyst, the carbon supported ultrafine platinum nickel rhodium ternary metal nanowire catalyst has a significant improvement in quality activity and catalytic stability, showing a good application potential The research was supported by the key research projects of Frontier Science of Chinese Academy of Sciences, national major scientific research program, National Natural Science Foundation, Postdoctoral Science Foundation and other projects.