Thermal Migration to Recover Spent Pt/C Catalyst

Recovery of spent Pt/C catalyst is a sustainable low-cost route to promote large-scale application of hydrogen fuel cells. Here, we report a thermal migration strategy to recover the spent Pt/C. In this route, the ZIF-8 is used to produce nitrogen doped porous carbon (NC) with abundant pyrimidine nitrogen sites as the new support. Subsequently, the spent Pt/C, NC, and NH4Cl etching reagent are mixed and heated at 900 oC to thermally migrate Pt from Pt/C onto NC with the help of NH4Cl etching reagent. The thermal-volatilized Pt tends to be captured by the pyrimidine nitrogen sites of NC support, thus producing the Pt clusters or 4 - 5 nm Pt particles. The recovered Pt/NC catalyst exhibits the highly stable oxygen reduction activities with a mass activity of 0.6 A mgPt-1 after 30000-cycle accelerated durability test.