(569ga) Porous Bimetallic Mesocrystals within Carbon Framework as high-performance bifunctional catalyst

Porous materials have been receiving considerable interest for its versatile applications such as reforming, separation, automobile exhaust control, olefin hydrogenation, fuel cells, sensors, environmental monitoring, and energy storage. In particular, porous metals are important because of their versatile applications as chemical catalysts for various petrochemical reactions (e.g., hydrogenation) and as electrocatalysts in energy-conversiontechnology (e.g., fuel cells). Despite the high demand on the porous alloy, the synthesis of alloyed porous nanocatalysts with various structures and compositions with a robust and stabilized structure, particularly at a high temperature, remains challenging

In this presentation, we demonstrate the thermally robust porous bimetallic mesocrystals with tunable composition embedded in the porous carbon framework through the scalable aerosol-assisted process. As-formed porous metallic alloy exhibits a high thermal stability of retained crystalline structure and morphology, as revealed by thermal resistance test. Our porous bimetallic porous materials in the carbon framework can be employed as a bifunctional catalyst for conventional conversion reaction and oxygen reduction reactions in fuel cells. Specifically, in the propylene hydrogenation, porous alloy of transition metals (Ni and Pt)shows excellent and tunable catalytic activity (high conversion ratio (＞80%) and low activation energy (<20 kJ/mol)). In addition, as a catalyst for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), the catalytic activity of porous metallic alloy shows superior electro-catalytic activity (0.85 mA/cm2Pt at 0.9 V) to that of conventional Pt/C because of homogeneous alloying of metal constituents and increased accessibility of reactants to the catalyst, resulted from the unique hierarchical structure of porous metallic alloy.