Designing Robust Support for Pt Alloy Nanoframes with Durable Oxygen Reduction Reaction Activity.

Polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are appealing to resolve the environmental and energy issues, whereas is still heavily inhibited by the dilemma for fabricating effective and durable electrocatalysts towards oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). In this work, highly open Pt3Cu nanoframes and one dimensional, hollow titanium nitride architectures are both successfully explored and implemented as the new system to replace the traditional Pt-Carbon motif. The ORR performance of the obtained electrocatalyst shows a specific and mass activity of 5.32 mAcm-2 and 2.43 AmgPt-1, respectively, which is 14.4 and 11.6 times higher than that of the commercial Pt/C. Notably, the novel catalyst also exhibits high stability, and a much slower performance degradation than that of the benchmarked Pt3Cu/C with the same durability testing procedures. The comprehensive data confirms that the new type catalyst possesses a high charge transfer during the ORR process, and the unique structure and synergistic effects between anchored Pt and the support mainly contributes to the high stability. This work provides a strategic method for designing effective ORR electrocatalyst with desirable stability.