Synchronization Preparation Of Tungsten Carbide / Carbon Composite Materials And Electrocatalysis Of Methanol Oxidation

Tungsten carbide (WC) has been considerably studied in hydrogenation, dehydrogenation, isomerization and fuel cells because of its Pt-like catalytic activities, excellent stability and CO poisoning tolerance. For example, in DMFC system, pure tungsten carbide alone shows far lower catalytic activity for methanol electro-oxidation than Pt. However, the participation of WC could significantly improve the catalystic activity of noble metal. This is attributed to the functionality of WC that can easily remove the strongly adsorbed CO formed during the decomposition of methanol. Hence, it's very meaningful to prepare tungsten carbide or tungsten carbide-containing composites for advanced applications.In this work, the ion-exchange resin with tunable functional organic groups is adopted as carbon source, by which certain one or more ionic guests can be simultaneously introduced into the carbon backbone through a facile ion-exchange procedure. The fabrication procedures start with simultaneous introduction of WO₄^2- and [Fe(CN)₆]^4- into the raw resin as as tungsten precursor and graphitization catalyst, respectively. After being carbonized under nitrogen atmosphere, tungsten carbide/graphitic carbon (WC/GC) nanocomposites were obtain. Also, tungsten carbide/amorphous carbon(WC/AC) or pure graphitic carbon nanostructure is obtained by change the types of metal ions precursor as individual WO₄^2- or [Fe(CN)₆]^4-.The composites were characterized and evaluated by XRD,Raman,TEM,TG-IR and BAS100 electrochemical analysis system. Owning to the homogeneous cross link and strong coulombic interactions, the guest species can be well dispersed and strongly anchored in the carbon framework.The ion exchange resin plays a double role as carbon source and in bonding of nanoparticle aggregation. All the composites are successfully used as support material in DMFC and show prominent promoting effect. This approach is easy, low-cost and opens the avenue to prepare more novel functional carbon-based composite materials from ion-exchange resins for advanced technological applications.