A dotted nanowire arrayed by 5 nm sized palladium and nickel composite nanopaticles showing significant electrocatalytic activity towards ethanol oxidation reaction (EOR)

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to report the preparation of a dotted nanowire arrayed by 5 nm sized palladium and nickel composite nanoparticles (denoted as PdxNiy NPs) via a hydrothermal method using NU and PdO·H2O as the starting materials. The samples prepared at the mass ratio of NU to PdO·H2O 1:1, 1:2 and 2:1 were, respectively, nominated as catalyst c1, c2 and c3. The chemical compositions of all synthesized catalysts were mainly studied by using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), revealing that metallic Ni was one main component of all prepared catalysts. Surprisingly, the main diffraction peaks appearing in the XRD patterns of all prepared catalysts were assigned to the metallic Ni rather than the metallic Pd. Very interestingly, as indicated by the TEM images, a large number of dotted nanowires arrayed by numerous equidistant 5 nm sized nanoparticles were distinctly exhibited in catalyst c1. More importantly, when being used as electrocatalysts for EOR, all prepared catalysts exhibited an evident electrocatalytic activity towards EOR. In the cyclic voltammetry (CV) test, the peak current density of the forward peak of EOR on catalyst c1 measured at 50 mV s−1 was as high as 56.1 mA cm−2, being almost 9 times higher than that of EOR on catalyst c3 (6.3 mA cm−2). Particularly, the polarized current density of EOR on catalyst c1 at 3600 s, as indicated by the chronoamperometry (CA) experiment, was still maintained to be around 1.47 mA cm−2, a value higher than the latest reported data of 1.3 mA cm−2 (measured on the pure Pd/C electrode). Presenting a novel method to prepare dotted nanowires arranged by 5 nm sized nanoparticles and showing the significant eletrocatalytic activities of the newly prepared dotted nanowires towards EOR were the major contributions of this preliminary work.