Surface Dealloyed Pt Nanoparticles Supported On Carbon Nanotubes: Facile Synthesis and Promising Applications for Direct Crude Glycerol Anion-Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell

Surface dealloyed PtCo nanoparticles supported on carbon nanotube: facile synthesis and promising application for anion exchange membrane direct crude glycerol fuel cell

Ji Qi¹, Le Xin¹, David Chadderdon¹, Yang Qiu¹, Yibo Jiang², Kai Sun³, Haiying He⁴, Zhiyong Zhang¹, Changhai Liang⁵, Wenzhen Li¹

¹Department of Chemical Engineering, Michigan Technological University

²Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Michigan Technological University

³Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Michigan

⁴Department of Physics, Michigan Technological University

⁵School of Chemical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology

⁶Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Michigan Technological University

Due to the fast growth of global energy needs and quickly diminishing of fossil fuel resources, people are forced to seek reliable, high performance, cost-effective and environmentally-beneficial renewable energy sources. Anion exchange membrane based direct alcohol fuel cells have recently attract enormous attention as a potential solution to alleviate the current energy issues.

Exploring crude glycerol as fuel for direct alcohol fuel cells not only provides a promising solution to using excessive biodiesel byproduct, but also opens a new avenue towards development of low-cost alcohol fuel cells. In the present study, surface dealloyed PtCo nanoparticles supported on carbon nanotube (SD-PtCo/CNT) were prepared by ex situ method and used for crude glycerol oxidation for the first time. SD-PtCo/CNT anode catalyst based AEMFC with a 0.5 mg_Pt cm^-2 achieved peak power densities of 268.5 mW cm^-2 (crude glycerol/O₂) and 284.6 mW cm^-2 (high purity glycerol/O₂) at 80 ^oC and ambient pressure, which are close to the published result of direct high purity glycerol solid oxide fuel cell operated at high temperature of 800 ^oC (327 mW cm^-2), and are higher than all other published performances of direct high purity glycerol microbial fuel cell and anion exchange membrane fuel cell. This work successfully developed a high output power direct alcohol fuel cells with biorenewable, environmentally-friendly fuel and dealloy technique prepared catalyst, which will substantially impact future catalyst design and fuel cell development.