Gram-Scale Synthesis of Well-Dispersed Shape-Controlled Pt−Ni/C as High-Performance Catalysts for the Oxygen Reduction Reaction

To further promote the development and industrialization of the fuel cell, it is urgent to exploit the high-performance catalysts prepared by simple and effective methods. Here, an effective and simple one-pot synthesis of well-dispersed Pt-Ni/C catalysts is reported. The shape-controlled 10 nm-sized Pt-Ni catalysts are successfully synthesized. Among them, the Pt-Ni/C-8h with a concave structure shows the best performance in the RDE test. Its concave structure makes it possess plentiful active sites and a higher platinum utilization, which help the catalytic performance. The mass activity (MA) and specific activity (SA) are nearly 13.8 and 12.5 times higher than those of commercial Pt/C catalysts (JM). After the accelerated durability test, the half-wave potential of Pt-Ni/C concave octahedron catalyst only shifted 9 mV and the mass activity could maintain 72.5%. In single cell tests, the MEA prepared by Pt-Ni/C-12h exhibits the best performance, which is 1.2 times that sprayed by Pt/C. It indicates that these nanoparticles can be promising catalysts to be applied to proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC).