Effect of Surface Activation Treatment on Pt/C Catalyst for Electrooxidation of Ethylene Glycol and Adsorbed CO
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Catalysis Letters Vol. 106, Nos. 3–4, February 2006 (Ó 2006) DOI: 10.1007/s10562-005-9625-1
Effect of surface activation treatment on Pt/C catalyst for electrooxidation of ethylene glycol and adsorbed CO Bing Wua,b, Ying Gaob, Guichun Lib, Weili Qub, and Zhaohua Jianga,* a
Department of Applied Chemistry, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, P. R. China b Department of Chemistry, Harbin Normal University, Harbin 150080, P. R. China
Received 12 July 2005; accepted 4 November 2005
It was reported for the first time that the electrocatalytic activity of the Pt/C electrode for the oxidation of ethylene glycol (EG) could be dramatically improved after the new surface treatment of the Pt/C electrode. It was also found that the surface treatment of the Pt/C electrode could greatly promote the electrooxidation of CO adsorbed on the Pt/C electrode. Promoting the electrooxidation of CO would lead to the acceleration of the electrooxidation of EG because CO is an intermediate product of the oxidation of EG and it would be strongly adsorbed on the Pt catalyst, leading the poison of the Pt/C catalyst.
1. Introduction
2. Experimental
Usually, methanol is used as the fuel in the direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC). However, methanol as the fuel in DMFC has some disadvantages. For example, it is toxic and inflammable. In addition, it is easy to permeate the proton exchange membrane causing a decrease in the cathode performance. Therefore, ethanol [1–3], acetaldehyde [4], EG [5,6] and other alcohols [7] have been considered and investigated as alternative fuels. However, the electrooxidation performances of these possible alternative fuels are lower than that of methanol. Among these alternative fuels, EG is an interesting candidate mainly because both the toxicity and permeableness through the membrane for EG are much less than methanol. Pt is a good catalyst for the alcohol electrooxidation, but it is very easy to be poisoned by an intermediate product of alcohol oxidation, CO [8]. In order to solve this problem, the Pt based complex catalysts, such as Pt– Ru [9,10], Pt–Sn [11], Pt–WOx [12] and Pt–TiO2 [13] are used as the anodic catalysts because they possess a high electrocatalytic activity for the alcohol oxidation and high CO tolerant ability. This paper reported a new way to solve the CO poisoning problem and thus to increase the electrocatalytic activity for the oxidation of EG at the Pt/C electrode. It was found in this paper that after the Pt/C electrode is pretreated with the mixture solution containing tetrahydrofuran(THF) and acetone, the electrocatalytic activity for EG oxidation and the CO tolerant ability of the Pt/C electrode could be greatly increased.
The carbon supporter is Vulcan XC-72 carbon black (Cabot Co.). Teflon suspension was supplied by Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences. CO (99.99%) and N2 (99.99%) were purchased from Northeast Special Gas Co and Nanya Gas Co., respectively. All the other chemicals were analytical grade. All the solutions were prepared with
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