The Electro-Oxidation Behavior Of Ethylene Glycol On Platinum And Platinum Based Electrodes

Due its many virtue, Fuel Cell have been attracted more and more attention. And the Direct Alcohol Fuel Cell(DAFC), using the liquid as its fuel, have much attractive development future because of its safety, easy for deposit and transportation, cheap, no need of the reforming of hydrogen. Nowadays the expensive metal Platinum and Platinum based catalyst are used and are thought of the most effected catalyst in fuel cell of DAFC. But as it is known that Platinum have a fatal disadvantage that it can adsorb CO very strongly resulting in the toxin of catalyst. So it is still a challenging subject to develop new making method that can enhance the efficiency of Platinum,lower the usage of Platinum,enhance the toxin resisting of Platinum based catalyst. A lot of progresses have been made in that aspect of study and application. People have developed a variety of method to do that such as adding the second metal(Ru, Sn, Mo etc.) can increase apparently the catalytic activity of platinum and toxin resisting of CO; developing new fabricating method to increase the dispersing and stability of Platinum and to control the size and crystal category of the nano-particle of Platinum to make it have the best catalytic activity; developing the catalyst that not based on Platinum etc..In dual-metal catalyst Pt-Ru is thought of the best catalyst of small alcohol molecule. Presently the dual-function mechanism and electronic effect are widely accepted as the catalytic mechanism. But due to the complexity of dual-metal catalyst in those aspect such as element ratio, crystal category, element distribution and size of nano-particle etc., the nano-particle that the composing and structure can be controllable must be made to understand comprehensively and thoroughly the catalytic mechanism, to study the relationship of structure, performance and activity, and in the end to provide theoretical guidance in practical catalytic design. Being a kind of small alcohol molecule Ethylene Glycol is also an ideal fuel in DAFC. But nowadays the study is most been focused on methanol, Ethanol etc.. So it is very necessary to carry out the study of EG electro-Oxidation on Platinum based Catalyst. So based on the discussion above the study is followed by:(1) Making Pt/Pt electrode of different roughness degree by electro-deposit and roughing method and studying its catalytic activity to EG by conventional electrochemical method (Cyclic voltammetry etc.) to understanding the influence of particle size and roughness degree to the catalytic activity.(2) Making the Pt-Ru/Pt and Pt-Sn/Pt electrodes by electro-deposit method to study its catalytic activity to CO and EG oxidation. In-situ SERS was used to study the EG electro-Oxidation behavior on those electrodes. From the study above the relationship of structure, performance, and activity was concluded preparatory.Furthermore, the making of nano-particle modified electrodes by chemical reduction was also attempted and its electro-oxidation activity to EG oxidation was also investigated.The study showed that Pt-Ru/Pt and Pt-Sn/Pt electrodes both have very good catalytic activity to EG electrode-oxidation. And its catalytic activity have large relationship with the composition and structure of catalyst.