Engineering crystalline structures/defects and elemental compositions is synthetically critical to optimize surface features of noble metal nanocrystals and thus improve their catalytic performances in various reactions. In this manuscript, we report a facile one-step aqueous synthesis of one-dimensional (1D) noble metal-metalloid alloy nanowires (NWs) with an ultrathin and wavy morphology, controlled crystalline defects, and binary PdB compositions as a highly efficient catalyst toward the electrochemical ethanol oxidation reaction (EOR). We show that the utilization of hexadecylpyridinium chloride as functional surfactant is of great importance to confine in-the-columnar epitaxial nucleation of anisotropic ultrathin PdB NWs, while the attachment growth precisely controls their surface crystalline defects with a wavy morphology. Meanwhile, this strategy is synthetically universal and can be readily extended to engineer an ultrathin wavy morphology and crystalline defect of ternary PdMB (M = Cu and Pt) alloy NWs. Owing to multiple structural and compositional merits, resultant PdB alloy NWs synergistically expose more electrocatalytically active sites and also kinetically accelerate the removal of CO-related poisons, remarkably improving electrocatalytic EOR activity and stability compared to their counterpart catalysts. Besides, wavy PdB alloy NWs are also electrochemically more active for electrocatalytic oxidation of other alcohols (methanol, glycerol, and glucose). The findings reported here thus shed a bright light on rational design of the high-performance metal alloy catalysts for their potential applications in fine chemical synthesis, fuel cells, and beyond.
Keywords: catalysis; crystalline defects; ethanol oxidation reaction; metal−metalloid; nanowires.