Study on Ethanol Electro-Oxidation at Carbon-supported Pt-Cu alloy Catalyst by Electrochemical Mass Spectrometry

Recently, researchers of Center for Advanced Technology Research and Development at Kim Il Sung University have synthesized Pt-Cu/C electrocatalyst and studied the electrocatalytic mechanism of the EOR on carbon supported Pt-Cu alloy catalysts by electrochemical mass spectrometry.

PtCu-3/C electrocatalyst was synthesized by microwave-polyol method following acid-treatment in ethylene glycol solution with H₂PtCl₆•6H₂O and Cu(CH₃COO)₂•H₂O as precursor salts.

Figure. Study on the electrocatalytic mechanism of the EOR by electrochemical mass spectrometry

The PtCu-3/C catalyst possesses the obviously higher CO₂ current efficiency (11.7 %) than the Pt/C catalyst (7.2 %) in the potentiodynamic EOR measurements. The potentiostatic EOR measurements on the synthesized electrocatalysts exhibited a higher kinetics in the potential range from 0.6 V to 0.8 V (vs. RHE) on Pt/C compared to PtCu-3/C because of the faster dehydrogenation of ethanol on Pt/C. POEMS results showed that production of CO₂ on PtCu-3/C during EOR is higher than that on Pt/C. After calibration of m/z = 44 mass signal, the CO₂ current efficiencies for Pt/C and PtCu-3/C up to 8.4 % and 18.7 %, respectively. These results suggested that the presence of Cu not only accelerates the oxidation of CO to CO₂ by providing more OH species due to the surface effects produced by chemical dealloying of Pt-Cu alloy, but also enhances the C-C bond cleavage, producing more CO₂ for ethanol electrooxidation.

Our work has been published in "RSC Advances" (2023, Vol. 13, pp 448-455) under the title of "Study on ethanol electro-oxidation at carbon-supported Pt-Cu alloy catalyst by pinhole on-line electrochemical mass spectrometry" (https://doi.org/10.1039/d2ra06989j).