Individual nanoparticles of fuel cell electrocatalysts: preparation and probing the oxygen reduction reaction

摘要

Pt and Pt-based alloy particles of nanometer size supported on carbon are the most widely used active catalysts in sate-of-the-art polymer electrolyte fuel cells.There has been a great interest in the relation between the activity of such catalyst electrodes towards fuel cell relevant reactions and the size of the supported catalyst particles.A better understanding on the size effects of catalyst particles on their electrocatalytic properties relies on strictly monodispersed particle size.However,supported catalyst particle assemblies always show relatively broad size distributions.The results obtained on such particle assembly electrodes therefore are not entirely reproducible .An alternative and novel approach to probe the size-related properties is to use individual particles.Preparation and manipulation of individual nanoparticles is of great significance in nanoscience,especially for understanding the size tunable properties of nanoparticles.