(617fe) Novel Methanol Electrocatalyst for Direct Methanol Fuel Cell Applications

The electro-catalysis of methanol oxidation is among the most significant challenges limiting large-scale commercialization of direct methanol fuel cells (DMFC). In order to realize the success of DMFC technology, exploration of new methanol electro-oxidation catalysts for performance improvement and cost reduction remains a major area of research. Among all the metals, Pt is believed to be the most active for the electro-oxidation of methanol in an acid environment.

For efficient operation of fuel cells innovations in the materials developments are required for fuel cells to be a feasible option amongst clean energy technologies. Many efforts have been made in various research laboratories to develop high-performance catalysts that will enhance the methanol electro- oxidation. Compared to any single-metal catalyst, Pt has shown the highest activity for the electro-oxidation of methanol in an acid environment. However, Pt is expensive and during the methanol electro-oxidation reaction, CO_ads and other organic intermediates such as formaldehyde, formic acid and methyl formate are formed on the Pt surface, which results in poisoning of the Pt catalyst.

Many binary and ternary catalysts for methanol electro-oxidation have been investigated and reported in the literature, most of them based on modification of Pt with some other metal (s). The aim is to accelerate the oxidation of the intermediates and decrease their accumulation so as to improve the catalyst performance. Among the various catalyst formulations, PtRu alloy has shown the best results for the methanol electro-oxidation. Diverse methods have been used to prepare the PtRu-based catalysts for methanol electro-oxidation. Catalyst composition and method of preparation are known to immensely affect the physical properties and electrochemical performance of a catalyst. Thus, there is the need to use a carefully selected approach in order to prepare a catalyst with the highest attainable performance. Incorporation of transition metals into the PtRu catalysts to form ternary catalysts in order to improve the performance of the PtRu catalysts is one of the techniques attracting a lot of interest. In this work, a novel approach have been used for synthesizing a new class of electrocatalyst nanomaterials for electro-oxidation of methanol by incorporation nano-oxides of transition metals. The prepared nanomaterial catalysts were characterized using FESEM, BET surface area, EDX, FT-IR and XRD. The catalysts performance was studied using cyclic voltammetry and compared with the commercial Pt-Ru/C.