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Updated: Apr 15, 2026
Growth of Gold Dendritic Nanoforests on Titanium Nitride-coated Silicon Substrates
Published on: June 3, 2019
A facile approach to prepare silicon-based Pt-Ag tubular dendritic nano-forests (tDNFs) for solar-light-enhanced
Chun-Ting Lin1, Ming-Hua Shiao2, Mao-Nan Chang3
1Instrument Technology Research Center, National Applied Research Laboratories, Hsinchu, 300 Taiwan ; Department of Engineering and System Science, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, 300 Taiwan.
Abstract:
In this paper, a facile two-step Galvanic replacement reaction (GRR) is proposed to prepare Pt-Ag tubular dendritic nano-forests (tDNFs) in ambient condition for enhancing methanol oxidation reaction (MOR) under solar illumination. In the first GRR, a homogeneous layer of silver dendritic nano-forests (DNFs) with 10 μm in thickness was grown on Si wafer in 5 min in silver nitride (AgNO3) and buffer oxide etchant (BOE) solution. In the second GRR, we utilized chloroplatinic acid (H2PtCl6) as the precursor for platinum (Pt) deposition to further transform the prepared Ag DNFs into Pt-Ag tDNFs. The catalytic performance and solar response of the Pt-Ag tDNFs toward methanol electro-oxidation are also studied by cyclic voltammetry (CV) and chronoamperometry (CA). The methanol oxidation current was boosted by 6.4% under solar illumination on the Pt-Ag tDNFs due to the induced localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) on the dendritic structure. Current results provide a cost-effective and facile approach to prepare solar-driven metallic electrodes potentially applicable to photo-electro-chemical fuel cells.
