Enhanced catalytic activity of Pt nanoparticle embedded metal oxides in fuel cells

COLL 522

Sung Jong Yoo, yoosj77@snu.ac.kr and Yung-Eun Sung, ysung@snu.ac.kr. School of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, 151-742, South Korea
The high exchange current densities of hydrogen and methanol on Pt group metals make the most suitable electrocatalytic materials for the fuel cell anode in acidic electrolyte. However, the use of pure Pt as the anode catalyst during the oxidation of fuels has the inherent problem that CO strongly adsorbs onto Pt sites and hydrogen atom isn't smoothly transferred into the support surface, relieving the performance of the fuel cell. In this presentation, we reported the characterization of Pt-based alloy nanosized catalysts with proton conducting metal oxides. The Pt-based nanocatalysts embedded metal oxides were prepared by thin film technique. The mean diameter of the Pt-based nanocatalysts can be varied from ~2 to ~10 nm by changing of the sputtering power ratio of targets. The proton spillover phenomenon was measured visually using the in situ electrochromic test. The methanol oxidation of the Pt-based nanocatalysts embedded metal oxides was superior to that of pure Pt. The high performance of the Pt-based nanocatalysts embedded metal oxides is due to the miniaturization of the Pt-based nanocatalysts and the proton spillover effect of metal oxides.