Issue 39, 2020

Carbon supported noble metal nanoparticles as efficient catalysts for electrochemical water splitting

Abstract

Due to an increasing requirement of clean and sustainable hydrogen energy economy, it is significant to develop new highly effective catalysts for electrochemical water splitting. In alkaline electrolyte, Platinum (Pt) shows a much slower hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) kinetics relative to acidic condition. Here, we show a versatile synthetic approach for combining different noble metals, such as Rhodium (Rh), RhPt and Pt nanoparticles, with carbon forming noble metal nanoparticles/nanocarbon composites, denoted as Rh(nP)/nC, RhPt(nP)/nC and Pt(nP)/nC, respectively. It was found that in alkaline media these composites exhibited higher performance for the HER than the commercial Pt/C. In particular, Rh(nP)/nC displayed a small overpotential of 44 mV at a current density of 5 mA cm−2 and a low Tafel slope of 50 mV dec−1. Meanwhile, it also showed a comparable activity for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) to the benchmarking catalyst RuO2. The superior HER and OER performance benefits from the very small size of nanoparticles and synergy between carbon support and nanoparticles.

Graphical abstract: Carbon supported noble metal nanoparticles as efficient catalysts for electrochemical water splitting

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Communication
Submitted
31 Jūl. 2020
Accepted
24 Sept. 2020
First published
24 Sept. 2020
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Nanoscale, 2020,12, 20165-20170

Carbon supported noble metal nanoparticles as efficient catalysts for electrochemical water splitting

M. Liu, F. Hof, M. Moro, G. Valenti, F. Paolucci and A. Pénicaud, Nanoscale, 2020, 12, 20165 DOI: 10.1039/D0NR05659F

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