A novel synthesis method for carbon-supported platinum nanoparticles for proton exchange membrane fuel cell

A simple and efficient approach for synthesizing carbon-supported Pt nanoparticles (NP) is presented. It combines homogeneous deposition (HD) of Pt complex species through a gradual increase of pH realized by in situ hydrolysis of urea and subsequent uniform reduction by ethylene glycol (EG) in a polyol process, giving control over the size and dispersion of Pt NP. With increasing amount of urea in the starting Pt salt aqueous solution, the size of the Pt complex species and the metallic Pt NP decreases. The electrocatalysis ability of the Pt catalysts produced by HD-EG is demonstrated via the determination of electrochemical surface area and fuel cell polarization performance. The Pt NP deposited on Vulcan XC-72 (VC) carbon black by the HD-EG strategy display smaller size with more uniform dispersion, higher Pt utilization efficiency, and improved fuel-cell polarization performance. The HD-EG method is efficient for the synthesis of high Pt loading catalysts with tunable NP size and uniform particle dispersion. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 2011 AIChE Spring Meeting & 7th Global Congress on Process Safety (Chicago, IL 3/13-17/2011).