| An effort to develop electrochemically smaller and well-dispersed catalytic material on a high surface area carbon material is required for fuel cell applications. In terms of pure metal catalysts, platinum has shown to be the most common catalyst used in fuel cells, but suffers from poisoning when carbon monoxide is strongly adsorbed on its surface when used for direct methanol fuel cell applications. The addition of a metal with the ability to form oxides, such as ruthenium, helps to oxidize the carbon monoxide, freeing the platinum surface for new methanol oxidation. The deposition of catalysts of PtRu onto a carbon support helps to increase the active surface area of the catalyst. Vulcan X is the most commonly used of the amorphous carbon materials for fuel cell applications. Also, a high-surface-area carbon material of interest is carbon nano-onions (CNOs), also known as multilayer fullerenes. The most convenient synthetic method for CNOs is annealing nanodiamond particles, thus retaining the size of the precursors and providing the possibility to prepare very small nanocatalysts using electrochemical techniques.;A rotating disk-slurry electrode (RoDSE) technique was developed as a unique method to electrochemically prepare bulk Pt/Carbon and PtRu/Carbon nanocatalysts avoiding a constant contact of the carbon support to an electrode surface during the electrodeposition process. The nanocatalysts were prepared by using a slurry that was saturated with functionalized Vulcan XC-72R and the metal precursor in sulfuric acid. The electrochemically prepared Pt/C and PtRu/C catalysts were characterized by using TEM, STEM, XRD, XRF, TGA, XPS and electrochemical techniques. A computational analysis also was done. |
