Pt seeding growth of directional coral-like NiO/CoO/Pt catalysts under low temperature electric field

Due to the excellent catalytic activities of Pt element, morphology controllable synthesis of Pt nanocatalysts is the hot research topics, and seed mediated growth of Pt nanocatalysts has been investigated. Nevertheless, Pt seeding growth of nanocatalysts for fuel cells has rarely been reported. Herein, we have controllably synthesized biomimetic coral-like NiO/CoO/Pt catalysts for fuel cells utilizing a Pt-seeding growth route under low temperature electric field, and the coral-like NiO/CoO/Pt catalysts demonstrated good ORR activity (onset potential: 0.736 V, halfwave potential: 0.659 V) under 273–278 K low temperature. Experiments demonstrate that Pt is a good seed element to mediate the controllable growth of coral-like NiO/CoO/Pt nanocatalysts. First-principles calculations elucidate that NiO(3 1 2), NiO(1 1 6) and CoO(4 0 0) are the active sites of coral-like NiO/CoO/Pt nanocatalysts, which contributes to their good low temperature ORR activities. The Pt-seeding growth route proposed in this paper will pave a new road for the design of high-efficient low Pt-content catalysts for fuel cells and lithium batteries.