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Updated: Mar 1, 2026
Synthesis of Platinum-nickel Nanowires and Optimization for Oxygen Reduction Performance
Published on: April 27, 2018
Achieving Remarkable Activity and Durability toward Oxygen Reduction Reaction Based on Ultrathin Rh-Doped Pt
Hongwen Huang1, Kan Li1, Zhao Chen1
1Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Key Laboratory of Strongly-Coupled Quantum Matter Physics of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Department of Chemical Physics, University of Science and Technology of China , Hefei, Anhui 230026, PR China.
Abstract:
The research of active and sustainable electrocatalysts toward oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) is of great importance for industrial application of fuel cells. Here, we report a remarkable ORR catalyst with both excellent mass activity and durability based on sub 2 nm thick Rh-doped Pt nanowires, which combine the merits of high utilization efficiency of Pt atoms, anisotropic one-dimensional nanostructure, and doping of Rh atoms. Compared with commercial Pt/C catalyst, the Rh-doped Pt nanowires/C catalyst shows a 7.8 and 5.4-fold enhancement in mass activity and specific activity, respectively. The combination of extended X-ray absorption fine structure analysis and density functional theory calculations reveals that the compressive strain and ligand effect in Rh-doped Pt nanowires optimize the adsorption energy of hydroxyl and in turn enhance the specific activity. Moreover, even after 10000 cycles of accelerated durability test in O2 condition, the Rh-doped Pt nanowires/C catalyst exhibits a drop of 9.2% in mass activity, against a big decrease of 72.3% for commercial Pt/C. The improved durability can be rationalized by the increased vacancy formation energy of Pt atoms for Rh-doped Pt nanowires.
