A paper titled “Highly Active Small Palladium Clusters Supported on Ferric Hydroxide for Carbon Monoxide-Tolerant Hydrogen Oxidation”delivered by Dr. Botao Qiao was published in ChemCatChem.

Article link:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cctc.201300947/abstract

Proton-exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) attracted most attention as one of the key enabling technologies for alternative energy. However, one of the major barriers to the PEMFC commercialization is that small amount of residual CO in the H₂ supply poisons the anode. On the other hand, alternatives to Pt anode recently received extensive attention because of limited reserve and high price of Pt. Moreover, for the promising direct alcohol fuel cell, Pt-based anode does not show acceptable power density so far, while Pd anode is active and stable for electrooxidation of either H₂ or alcohols. Therefore, development of CO-tolerant Pd anode seems more attractive and significant. In this paper work, Botao Qiao et al. found the Pd/FeO_x catalyst consisted of small Pd clusters and single atoms was highly active and durable for this reaction at a wide temperature range (20 – 120 ℃, much wider than the optimized fuel cell working temperature). Detailed characterization revealed that the excellent performance originated from the very small clusters and even single atoms of Pd which resulted in a weakened adsorption of CO. More importantly, the fundamental understanding of this excellent CO-tolerance may offer a new strategy to design CO-tolerant Pd electrocatalyst by dispersing Pd as very small clusters or even single atoms on a suitable support.

ChemCatChem is a journal of chemical catalysis, founded by the Royal Spanish Chemical Society and the German Chemical Society and published by Wiley-VCH. It is the sister journal of Angewandte Chemie, Chemistry-A European Journal and a series of ChemXXXChem. Contributions to ChemCatChem cover research in all fields of catalysis, including heterogeneous, homogeneous, bio- and nanocatalysis. The 2012 impact factor of ChemCatChem is 5.181.