Highly porous Pt-Pb nanostructures as active and ultrastable catalysts for polyhydric alcohol electrooxidations

Highly porous materials have attracted intensive attention in the past decades due to their unique geometrical configuration, unusual structural features, and outstanding physicochemical properties, but the facile creation of porous metal nanomaterias remains a formidable challenge. Most reports focused on using hard templates to create porous metal nanomaterials via sacrificing the templates. Herein, we have created a new class of porous PtPb/Pt nanocrystals (NCs) with well-defined morphology, composition and porosity through a facile chemical etching approach. Due to the highly open three-dimensional (3D) structure and alloy effect, the porous PtPb/Pt NCs exhibit enhanced performances towards polyhydric alcohol electrooxidations with the optimized porous Pt3Pb nanoplates exhibiting superior activities of 1.75 mA cm−2 and 1.19 A mg−1Pt for ethylene glycol oxidation reaction (EGOR) and of 1.46 mA cm−2 and 1.00 A mg−1Pt for glycerol oxidation reaction (GOR) that are much higher than the commercial Pt/C (0.34 mA cm−2 and 0.22 A mg−1Pt for EGOR, 0.30 mA cm−2 and 0.20 A mg−1Pt for GOR). In addition, the porous Pt3Pb nanoplates can endure the long-term stability in EG and glycerol oxidation reactions with limited activity and structure change after 20,000 and 5,000 cycles, respectively, showing a highly promising class of porous Ptbased electrocatalysts for direct polyhydric alcohol fuel cells and beyond.