Interfacial Study of Nickel-Modified Pt(111) Surfaces in Phosphate-Containing Solutions: Effect on the Hydrogen Evolution Reaction

The surface modification of electrodes attracts great interest in electrocatalysis. It has often been observed that deposition of foreign adatoms on the surface of an electrode can originate a significant enhancement in the catalytic activity. For example, it has been reported that nickel deposits on Pt surfaces improve the rate of the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER, Nature Energy 2017, 2, 17031). During the deposition process of such metal adlayers, the pH and the nature of the ions in the electrolyte play an important role. Phosphate species are typically used to prepare buffer solutions in a wide range of pH. Therefore, electrolytes containing phosphate species are used in a large number of applications. However, the effect of phosphate on platinum surface modification with nickel deposits has not been studied yet. In this work, new data about the interaction of phosphate with nickel adatoms deposited on Pt(111) at pH 5 is investigated using cyclic voltammetry and infrared spectroscopy. The results show that, when nickel is in solution, the phosphate ions are adsorbed at lower potentials than in the absence of nickel. In addition, Laser-Induced Temperature Jump Technique demonstrates that nickel facilitates the adsorption of phosphate because of a shift of the potential of zero charge (pzc) toward negative potentials. This increases the magnitude of the positive electric field on the electrode surface, at a given potential E>pzc, facilitating the adsorption of anions. CO displacement technique has been also employed to obtain additional information about co-adsorbed phosphate on nickel adlayers. Finally, the HER has been studied at pH 5 in the presence of nickel, with and without phosphate in the bulk solution.