Ultrafine jagged platinum nanowires enable ultrahigh mass activity for the oxygen reduction reaction

Mufan Li; Zipeng Zhao; Tao Cheng; Alessandro Fortunelli; Chih-Yen Chen; Rong Yu; Qinghua Zhang; Lin Gu; Boris V Merinov; Zhaoyang Lin; Enbo Zhu; Ted Yu; Qingying Jia; Jinghua Guo; Liang Zhang; William A Goddard 3rd; Yu Huang; Xiangfeng Duan

doi:10.1126/science.aaf9050

Ultrafine jagged platinum nanowires enable ultrahigh mass activity for the oxygen reduction reaction

Science. 2016 Dec 16;354(6318):1414-1419. doi: 10.1126/science.aaf9050. Epub 2016 Nov 17.

Authors

Mufan Li¹, Zipeng Zhao², Tao Cheng³, Alessandro Fortunelli^{3

4}, Chih-Yen Chen², Rong Yu⁵, Qinghua Zhang⁶, Lin Gu⁶, Boris V Merinov³, Zhaoyang Lin¹, Enbo Zhu², Ted Yu^{3

7}, Qingying Jia⁸, Jinghua Guo⁹, Liang Zhang⁹, William A Goddard 3rd¹⁰, Yu Huang^{11

12}, Xiangfeng Duan^{13

12}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
² Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
³ Materials and Process Simulation Center, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
⁴ CNR-ICCOM, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 56124 Pisa, Italy.
⁵ National Center for Electron Microscopy in Beijing, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, P. R. China.
⁶ Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, P. R. China.
⁷ Department of Chemical Engineering, California State University, Long Beach, CA 90840, USA.
⁸ Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
⁹ Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
¹⁰ Materials and Process Simulation Center, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA. wag@wag.caltech.edu yhuang@seas.ucla.edu xduan@chem.ucla.edu.
¹¹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. wag@wag.caltech.edu yhuang@seas.ucla.edu xduan@chem.ucla.edu.
¹² California NanoSystems Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
¹³ Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. wag@wag.caltech.edu yhuang@seas.ucla.edu xduan@chem.ucla.edu.

PMID: 27856847
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf9050

Abstract

Improving the platinum (Pt) mass activity for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) requires optimization of both the specific activity and the electrochemically active surface area (ECSA). We found that solution-synthesized Pt/NiO core/shell nanowires can be converted into PtNi alloy nanowires through a thermal annealing process and then transformed into jagged Pt nanowires via electrochemical dealloying. The jagged nanowires exhibit an ECSA of 118 square meters per gram of Pt and a specific activity of 11.5 milliamperes per square centimeter for ORR (at 0.9 volts versus reversible hydrogen electrode), yielding a mass activity of 13.6 amperes per milligram of Pt, nearly double previously reported best values. Reactive molecular dynamics simulations suggest that highly stressed, undercoordinated rhombus-rich surface configurations of the jagged nanowires enhance ORR activity versus more relaxed surfaces.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't