Epitaxial growth of Pd clusters on N-doped Ag nanowires for oxygen reduction reaction

Abstract

Efficient and stable Pt-free electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) are indispensable for future fuel cells. Herein, we describe a heterostructure of Pd nanocrystals (PdNCs) on N-doped Ag nanowires (NWs) synthesized using a direct epitaxial growth strategy with a Pd loading of only 9.5 wt.%. The PdAg bimetallic heterostructure showed the highest mass activity among reported PdAg-based ORR electrocatalysts and exhibited excellent stability, with only a 1.5 mV decay in the half-wave potential even after 20000 cycles of continuous testing. The remarkably enhanced activity and durability can be attributed to the distinct advantages of the ultrasmall PdNCs, cocatalysts of N-doped AgNWs, and their heterointerfaces. This work reveals that the epitaxial growth of a heterostructure on a stable support is a promising strategy for promoting catalytic performance.

Keywords

N doping / Epitaxial growth / PdAg heterostructure / Ag nanowires / Oxygen reduction

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Qinhe Guan: Writing - original draft, Investigation. Shiwei Sun: Software, Investigation. Xiaohang Ge: Investigation. Fan Zhang: Investigation. Lijie Qu: Investigation. Chao Yin: Investigation. Weiyong Yuan: Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Supervision. Lianying Zhang: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Conceptualization.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22379078).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi: 10.1016/j.chphma.2024.06.004.

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