Enhanced methanol oxidation activity and stability of Pt particles anchored on carbon-doped TiO2 nanocoating support

In this work, carbon-doped TiO2 nanocoating (TiO2–C) was prepared by a sol–gel process and employed as the support of Pt nanoparticles for methanol oxidation reaction (MOR). The obtained Pt/TiO2–C catalyst was characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and electrochemical measurements. XRD characterization shows that the average crystallite sizes of Pt particles and TiO2–C support are 2.7 and 6.5 nm, respectively. TEM characterizations show that Pt particles are highly dispersed on TiO2 nanocoating, which preserves its nanoscale structure without no apparent sintering after carbon doping. XPS characterization shows that the Pt particles anchored on TiO2–C exhibit positively shifted binding energies of Pt 4f. Cyclic voltammetry (CV) and chronoamperometry (CA) characterizations show that TiO2–C has a greatly enhanced electrical conductivity and Pt/TiO2–C catalyst has better electrocatalytic activity and stability than Pt/C catalyst for MOR, which could be attributed to the high dispersion of Pt particles on TiO2–C support, the strong metal-support interactions between Pt particles and TiO2–C support, and the rich active –OH species on TiO2–C support.