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Wet-milling synthesis of immobilized Pt/Ir nanoclusters as promising heterogeneous catalysts

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Abstract

Being a typical state of the art heterogeneous catalyst, supported noble metal catalyst often demonstrates enhanced catalytic properties. However, a facile synthetic method for realizing large-scale and low-cost supported noble metal catalyst is strictly indispensable. To this end, by making use of the strong metal-support interaction (SMSI) and mechanochemical reaction, we introduce an efficient synthetic route to obtain ultrafine Pt and Ir nanoclusters immobilized on diverse substrates by wet chemical milling. We further demonstrate the scaling-up effect of our approach by large-scale ball-milling production of Pt nanoclusters immobilized on TiO2 substrate. The synthesized Pt/Ir@Co3O4 catalysts exhibit superior oxygen evolution reaction (OER) performance with only 230 and 290 mV overpotential to achieve current density of 10 and 100 mA·cm−2, beating the catalytic performance of Co3O4 supported Pt or Ir clusters and commercial Ir/C. It is envisioned that the present work strategically directs facile ways for fabricating supported noble metal heterogeneous catalysts.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundations of China (Nos. 51902027, 61874014, 61874013, 51788104, 61974011 and 61976025), the Basic Science Center Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51788104), National Basic Research of China (Nos. 2016YFE0102200 and 2018YFB0104404), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (No. JQ19005), Fund of State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications & School of Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876, China

    Peng Du, Kai Huang, Xiaoyuan Fan, Jingteng Ma, Ruyue Wang, Ru Zhang & Ming Lei

  2. State Key Laboratory of New Ceramics and Fine Processing, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Peng Du, Bohan Deng & Hui Wu

  3. Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, China

    Naveed Hussain

  4. Institutes of Physical Science and Information Technology, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601, China

    Binghui Ge

  5. State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, 430070, China

    Haolin Tang

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  1. Peng Du
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  2. Kai Huang
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  3. Xiaoyuan Fan
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  10. Ru Zhang
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Correspondence to Kai Huang, Ming Lei or Hui Wu.

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Du, P., Huang, K., Fan, X. et al. Wet-milling synthesis of immobilized Pt/Ir nanoclusters as promising heterogeneous catalysts. Nano Res. 15, 3065–3072 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-021-3963-1

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