Photodeposition of Pt nanoparticles onto TiO2@CNT as high-performance electrocatalyst for oxygen reduction reaction

The commonly used Pt/C catalyst has low durability for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). In this work, CNT-supported TiO2 nanoparticles, which synergistically combines the merits of TiO2 (high stability and strong interactions with the supported Pt nanoparticles) and CNT (high specific surface area and large electrical conductivity), are prepared by a sol-gel process coupled with an annealing process and used as the support for Pt nanoparticles, which are anchored around TiO2 nanoparticles by a photodeposition technique. The as-synthesized Pt/TiO2@CNT catalyst exhibits a mass activity 5.3 times as large as that of the commercial Pt/C catalyst (0.358 A mgPt−1 vs. 0.067 A mgPt−1 at 0.9 V) and an excellent stability (no activity loss after 10000 potential cycles) for ORR, which can be mainly attributed to the lower oxygen adsorption energy of Pt, resulting from the strong metal-support interaction induced by the deposition of Pt nanoparticles around the well-dispersed TiO2 nanoparticles on CNT.