Dimethyl ether (DME) has been considered as a promising alternative fuel for direct-feed fuel cells but lack of an efficient DME oxidation electrocatalyst has remained the challenge for the commercialization of the direct DME fuel cell. The commonly studied binary PtRu catalyst shows much lower activity in DME than methanol oxidation. In this work, guided by density functional theory (DFT) calc...

We demonstrated the self-assembly of transition metal carbide nanoparticles coated with atomically thin noble metal monolayers by carburizing mixtures of noble metal salts and transition metal oxides encapsulated in removable silica templates. This approach allows for control of the final core-shell architecture, including particle size, monolayer coverage, and heterometallic composition. Carbo...

Gold nanoparticles where synthesized and supported on carbon, or directly carbon according to five different methods reported in literature, aiming at particles < 10 nm. Characterization was done with transmission electron microscopy thermogravimetric analysis. Although all syntheses yielded an average diameter nm, the formation of few very large particles, a relatively amount Au is buried, as ...

Combinatorial screening of electrochemical catalysts by current-voltage methods can be unwieldy for large sample sizes. By converting the ions generated in an electrochemical half-cell reaction to a fluorescence signal, the most active compositions in a large electrode array have been identified. A fluorescent acid-base indicator was used to image high concentrations of hydrogen ions, which wer...

Abstract Mass activity and long-term stability are two major issues in current fuel cell catalyst designs. While supported catalysts normally suffer from poor but show high mass activity, unsupported tend to perform better the first point while showing deficits latter one. In this study, a facile synthesis route towards self-supported metallic electrocatalyst nanoarchitectures with both aspects...