Facile and Surfactant-Free Routed Spherical Au@Pt Core-Shell-Satellite Nanoparticles as High-Efficient and Stable Electrocatalyst for Methanol Oxidation

The spherical Au@Pt core-shell-satellite nanoparticles (NPs) are fabricated via a facile, efficient, and surfactant-free method of seed-mediated growth, and the electrocatalytic performance toward the methanol oxidation reaction (MOR) is systematically researched by cyclic voltammetry. Compared with commercial Pt/C, all the obtained Au@Pt NPs with such a core-shell-satellite structure exhibit greatly enhanced electrocatalytic activity and long-term stability toward MOR. Among them, Au-90@Pt-10 NPs with less loading of Pt exhibit the most significantly enhanced electrocatalytic performance with a mass activity of 1.470 A mg(Pt)(-1), approximately 13 times that of commercial Pt/C (0.111 A mg(Pt)(-1)) and specific activity (1.469 mA cm(-2)) approximately 9 times that of commercial Pt/C (0.157 mA cm(-2)). Au-95@Pt-5 NPs have the highest value of the oxidation current density (0.2615 mA cm(-2)), corresponding to 62.8% of its initial maximum value (0.4165 mA cm(-2)), showing higher stability at approximately 4000 s. Such a surfactant-free synthesis technique of Au@Pt bimetallic NPs may be a simple method to prepare self-supported bimetallic nanostructures, which is important to develop highly effective electrocatalysts for MORs.