Platinum supported on multifunctional titanium cobalt oxide nanosheets assembles for efficient oxygen reduction reaction

To move towards the successful commercialization of fuel cells, emphasizing solely on the catalytic activity is not sufficient, and requirements on performance stability are also urgently to be solved. In this work, we describe a facile and robust strategy to the development of a novel Pt based catalyst with binary titanium cobalt oxide as the support. The binary titanium cobalt oxide nanotubes are characterized with hierarchical tubular porous and hollow structures that constructed by ultrathin interconnected nanosheets assembles (labeled as Ti0.8Co0.2O2 NTAs). The resultant catalyst (Pt/Ti0.8Co0.2O2 NTAs) exhibited much higher mass activity for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) compared with the commercial Pt/C catalyst, and it also possesses excellent structure stability. The experimental data demonstrates that the novel support plays a significant role in the enhanced ORR activity, which not only acts as a robust and desirable support to afford a high dispersion for Pt nanoparticles, but also as a co-catalyst to boost the activity of the resultant catalyst via the modulation of the electronic structures of the supported Pt atoms. This work opens a new path for maximizing the ORR activity and durability by introducing porous binary titanium based oxides as the Pt support, which combines the merits of high stability, co-catalysis and doping effects. (c) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.