An extremely efficient ethanol fuel cell electrode is produced by combining the large surface area of vertically oriented and highly conductive few-layer graphene sheets with electrochemically deposited palladium nanoparticles. The electrodes show an extraordinary high catalyst activity of up to 7977 mA/(mg Pd) at low catalyst loadings of 0.64 μg/cm2 and a very high current density of up to 106 mA/cm2 at high catalyst loadings of 83 μg/cm2. Moreover, the low onset potentials combined with a good poisoning resistance and long-term stability make these electrodes highly suitable for real applications. These features are achieved by using a newly developed electrochemical catalyst deposition process exploiting high voltages of up to 3.5 kV. This technique allows controlling the catalyst amount ranging from a homogeneous widespread distribution of small (≤ 10 nm) palladium nanoparticles to rather dense layers of particles, while every catalyst particle has electrical contact to the graphene electrode.
@article{arxiv.1610.05169,
title = {Highly Efficient Fuel Cell Electrodes from Few-Layer Graphene Sheets and Electrochemically Deposited Palladium Nanoparticles},
author = {Michael Höltig and Charlotte Ruhmlieb and Tobias Kipp and Alf Mews},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.05169},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in J. Phys. Chem. C, copyright {\copyright} American Chemical Society after peer review and technical editing by the publisher