Preparation And Electrocatalytic Properties Of Graphene Supported PdBi And PdNi Catalysts Under Microwave Irradiation

As large number of new electronic products appears in people’s life, all kinds of personal protable electrical equipment for the power supply has also been gradually required to improve, such as mobile phones and laptops. So, the people begin to focus on researching and developing energy of new fuel cells to replace the ordinary batteries. According to the survey, the proton exchange membrane fuel cell as the portable power supply of electrical equipment exists some problems, such as, it is very difficult to storage and carry hydrogen. And the direct methanol fuel cell may be harmful for people and poison the catalyst.As alternative fuel of hydrogen and methanol, formic acid gets more attention in the application of fuel cells, because it has many irreplaceable advantages:(1) non-toxic; (2) non-flammable; (3) the open circuit voltage is 1.45V, it is higher than hydrogen and methanol; (4) it is easy to be oxided, and has better oxidation performance than methanol; (5) the membrane permeability is far lower than methanol because of the electrostatic repulsion between formate ions and sulfonic acid group, so it improves the power of the fuel cell. The research team compared the catalytic performance of Pd, Pt and PdPt catalysts for the formic acid oxidation, and found that the catalytic performance of Pd and PdPt catalysts were much better than Pt catalyst. Therefore, more attention paid to the Pd and Pd-based composite catalysts.In this research, the Bi and Ni as a second metal to be doped into the Pd catalyst, and using microwave heating to synthesize the Pd/rGO, PdBi/rGO and PdNi/rGO catalysts with different components. In the process of reaction, the ethylene glycol as solvent and reducing agent, the grapheme oxide was reduced and as the carrier of the catalysts. The PdBi/rGO and PdNi/rGO composite catalysts were synthesized by different proportion of Pd and the second metal. The research mainly focused on the method of synthesize catalysts and their catalytic performance for formic acid oxidation combining with the characterization of TEM, XRD and XPS. The test result showed that the PdBi/rGO and PdNi/rGO catalysts were better than PdBi/rGO and commercial Pd/C catalysts.