title: Rational construction of strongly coupled metal-metal oxide-graphene nanostructure with excellent electrocatalytic activity and durability.
abstract: The interaction within heterogeneous nanostructures can provide a great opportunity to radically enhance their electrocatalytic properties and increase their activity and durability. Here a rational, simple, and integrated strategy is reported to construct uniform and strongly coupled metal-metal oxide-graphene nanostructure as an electrocatalyst with high performance. We first simply synthesized the interacted SnO2-prGO (protected and reduced graphene oxide) hybrid with SnO2 nanoparticles (∼4 nm) selectively anchored on the oxygenated defects of rGO using an in situ redox and hydrolysis reaction. After the deposition of Pt, uniform Pt NPs are found to contact intimately and exclusively with the SnO2 phase in the SnO2-prGO hybrid. This constructed nanostructure (Pt-SnO2-prGO) exhibits significantly improved electrocatalytic activity (2.19-fold) and durability (2.08-fold) toward methanol oxidation over that of the state-of-the-art Pt/C catalyst. The detailed explanation of the strong coupling between SnO2 and graphene as well as between Pt and SnO2 is discussed, revealing that such a process can be used to immobilize various metal catalysts on metal-oxide-decorated catalysts for realizing advanced catalytic systems with enhanced performance.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Biomaterials, Department of Applied Chemistry, College of Sciences, South China Agricultural University , Guangzhou 510642, China.
authors.forename: Haoliang
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Yingju
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Qiongzhi
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.forename: Weishuo
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Ruan
authors.forename: Xiaomin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.forename: Xin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Li