Direct Electro-oxidation of Dimethyl Ether on Pt-Cu Nanochains

A new platinum-copper alloy electrocatalyst for the direct electro-oxidation of dimethyl ether (DME) has been synthesized in an easy and low-cost approach and studied by using an array of techniques, including X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, and elemental analysis. Structural characterization revealed that the synthesized PtCu nanoparticles (3 nm on average) formed homogeneous nanochains without aggregation of metallic platinum or copper. The catalyst's activity towards electro-oxidation of DME was tested using cyclic voltammetry (CV) and in membrane-electrode assembly (MEA) in a full cell and was found to be promising. The direct DME fuel cell (DDMEFC) studied in this work has relatively high energy density, of 13.5 mW cm^-1 and thus shows great potential as fuel for low power fuel cells. The newly synthesized PtCu catalyst exhibited almost double the performance of commercial PtRu in electrocatalytic DME oxidation.