Highly-Branched PtCu Nanocrystals with Low-Coordination for Enhanced Oxygen Reduction Catalysis

Low-coordination platinum-based nanocrystals emanate great potential for catalyzing the oxygen reduction reactions (ORR) in fuel cells, but are not widely applied owing to poor structural stability. Here, several PtCu nanocrystals (PtCu NCs) with low coordination numbers were prepared via a facile one-step method, while the desirable catalyst structures were easily obtained by adjusting the reaction parameters. Wherein, the Pt₁Cu₁ NCs catalyst with abundant twin boundaries and high-index facets displays 15.25 times mass activity (1.647 A mg_Pt ^-1 at 0.9 V_RHE) of Pt/C owing to the abundant effective active sites, low-coordination numbers and appropriate compressive strain. More importantly, the core-shell and highly developed dendritic structures in Pt₁Cu₁ NCs catalyst give it an extremely high stability with only 17.2% attenuation of mass activity while 61.1% for Pt/C after the durability tests (30 000 cycles). In H₂-O₂ fuel cells, Pt₁Cu₁ NCs cathode also exhibits a higher peak power density and a longer-term lifetime than Pt/C cathode. Moreover, theoretical calculations imply that the weaker adsorption of intermediate products and the lower formation energy barrier of OOH* in Pt₁Cu₁ NCs collaboratively boost the ORR process. This work offers a morphology tuning approach to prepare and stabilize the low-coordination platinum-based nanocrystals for efficient and stable ORR.