One-pot construction of N-doped graphene supported 3D PdAg nanoflower as efficient catalysts for ethylene glycol electrooxidation

Rational design and support introduction of electrocatalysts are significant for the improvement of their performances for electrooxidation reaction, but still a grand challenge. Herein, we developed a facile one-pot method to construct a unique class of N-doped graphene supported three-dimensional (3D) PdAg nanoflowers catalysts (denoted as PdAg NFs/NG) under the room temperature. It is found that the introduction of NG is beneficial for reducing the diameter of 3D PdAg NFs, where the synthesized PdAg NFs/NG show significantly enhanced electrocatalytic performances towards ethylene glycol oxidation reaction (EGOR). Specifically, benefiting from strong synergistic effect, modified electronic structure, largely improved conductivity, and high surface active areas, the resultant PdAg NFs/NG demonstrate the mass and specific activity of 5765.3 mA mg−1 and 11.9 mA cm−2 for the ethylene glycol electrooxidation, which are 5.4 and 5.95 times higher than those of commercial Pd/C catalysts, respectively. More importantly, after the successful introduction of NG, the PdAg NFs/NG also displays great improvement in durability, which retains the mass activity of 4208.7 mA mg−1 after long-term electrochemical measurement, 2.62 and 20.1 times larger than 3D PdAg NFs and Pd/C catalysts. The present work manifests the facile construction of advanced nanocatalysts with optimized functional properties.