Tuning the Pt-Ru Atomic Neighbors for Active and Stable Methanol Oxidation Electrocatalysis

Controlling the coordination environment of the nanocatalyst surface is a major synthetic challenge to producing electrocatalysts with high activity and high stability. This is particularly important for the methanol oxidation reaction (MOR) in which multiple neighboring metal atoms are needed to prevent CO poisoning. Using a combination of tunable Pt-island size and a spreading process, we can vary the Pt loading on branched Ru nanoparticles, which leads to tunable proportions of Pt-Pt and Pt-Ru neighboring atoms at the surface. The controlled coordination environments are shown to be critical to stripping poisoning CO intermediates and can be precisely tuned to achieve highly active and stable MOR catalysts. These results show a new concept in synthetically controlling the coordination environment around a catalytic site for improved activity and stability that can be applied to other multimetal nanocatalysts.