Periodic Reporting for period 2 - 123STABLE (Towards Nanostructured Electrocatalysts with Superior Stability)
Reporting period: 2021-07-01 to 2022-12-31
Among others, in the recent paper by Đukič et al, ACS Catalysis 2021 online dissolution setup was upgraded to enable temperature control. Interestingly, upon raising the temperature in electrochemical testing of our PtCo/C catalyst, we revealed that while less noble metal (Co) dissolution was increasing Pt dissolution was decreasing.
Progress was also made on electron microscopy data processing and simulations, which is part of work package 2 (Koderman Podboršek et al, Electrochim. Acta 2022). We demonstrated the ability to automatically process atomically resolved STEM images with in-house developed computer algorithms where different unprecedented information can be extracted, for instance, surface roughening was increasing through the electrochemical treatment of Ir nanoparticles larger than 2 nm Ir nanoparticles, whereas for smaller ones it remained constant. We believe this approach will also reveal new atomically-resolved catalysts stability insights in other electrocatalytic systems.
First results were achieved for work package 3 where perspective Pt-based electrocatalysts with enhanced stability were already produced on a large scale (Pavko et al, ACS Catalysis 2022). We are now developing methods to prepare even more stable Pt catalysts and different methods to produce Ir-based catalysts on a larger scale.