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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DYNECAT (Microscopic Surface Dynamics of Pt and Pt Alloy Electrocatalysts under operation conditions)

Teaser

Summary

Fuel cell is a promising solution towards the urgent issues of energy and environment in modern society, which produces energy in a mild and efficient way from fossil fuel. However, it has been found that the platinum-based electrocatalyst degrades during the operation of fuel cell, which highly limits the performance and life time of fuel cell. The degradation is thought to be from the over-oxidation of platinum-based electrocatalyst of the cathode. The project is aiming to understand the degradation of Pt-based on the operation conditions by characterizing the surface morphology and surface species at the intermediate stage of electrochemical oxidation.

Work performed

In-situ shell-isolated nanoparticle-enhanced Raman spectroscopy has been performed on single crystalline Pt and polycrystalline Pt to collect the fingerprint of the surface species at the intermediates
Electrochemical voltammetry has been performed to correlate the studies of electrochemical oxidation with that of UHV-based surface science on single crystalline.
A new reference electrode with an accurate potential has been made for the scanning tunneling microscopic (STM) measurement.
The in-situ STM study on single crystalline Pt(111) has been made to study the morphology during electrochemical oxidation.

Final results

For the first time, the surface species on single and poly crystalline Pt at the intermediate stage is revealed. The studies on Pt surface oxides by electrochemistry are correlated with that of UHV-based surface science regarding the similarity and difference, which motivates scientists to think about how to comprehensively correlate the surface electrochemistry with surface science.