Three-Dimensional Pt-on-Pd Bimetallic Nanodendrites Supported on Graphene Nanosheet: Facile Synthesis and Used as an Advanced Nanoelectrocatalyst for Methanol Oxidation

Abstract

Graphene nanosheet, the hottest material in physics and materials science, has been studied extensively because of its unique electronic, thermal, mechanical, and chemical properties arising from its strictly 2D structure and because of its potential technical applications. Particularly, these remarkable characteristics enable it to be a promising candidate as a new 2D support to load metal nanoparticles (NPs) for application in fuel cells. However, constructing high-quality graphene/bimetallic NP hybrids with high electrochemical surface area (ECSA) remains a great challenge to date. In this paper, we demonstrate for the first time a wet-chemical approach for the synthesis of high-quality three-dimensional (3D) Pt-on-Pd bimetallic nanodendrites supported on graphene nanosheets (TP-BNGN), which represents a new type of graphene/metal heterostructure. The resulting hybrids were characterized by atomic force microscopy (AFM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), high-resolution TEM (HRTEM), energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), Raman spectroscopy, and electrochemical technique. It is found that small single-crystal Pt nanobranches supported on Pd NCs with porous structure and good dispersion were directly grown onto the surface of graphene nanosheets, which exhibits high electrochemical active area. Furthermore, the number of nanobranches for Pt-on-Pd bimetallic nanodendrites on the surface of graphene nanosheets could be easily controlled via simply changing the synthetic parameters, thus resulting in the tunable catalytic properties. Most importantly, the electrochemical data indicate that the as-prepared graphene/bimetallic nanodendrite hybrids exhibited much higher electrocatalytic activity toward methanol oxidation reaction than the platinum black (PB) and commercial E-TEK Pt/C catalysts.