A facile approach to prepare silicon-based Pt-Ag tubular dendritic nano-forests (tDNFs) for solar-light-enhanced methanol oxidation reaction

• Published in: Nanoscale research letters Vol. 10; no. 1; p. 74
• Main Authors: Lin, Chun-Ting, Shiao, Ming-Hua, Chang, Mao-Nan, Chu, Nancy, Chen, Yu-Wei, Peng, Yu-Hsuan, Liao, Bo-Huei, Huang, Hung Ji, Hsiao, Chien-Nan, Tseng, Fan-Gang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 18.02.2015; Springer Nature B.V; BioMed Central Ltd
• Subjects: Chemistry and Materials Science; Materials Science; Molecular Medicine; Nano Express; Nanochemistry; Nanoscale Science and Technology; Nanotechnology; Nanotechnology and Microengineering; Galvanic replacement reaction; Tubular dendritic nano-forests; Direct methanol fuel cell
• ISSN: 1931-7573; 1556-276X; 1556-276X
• DOI: 10.1186/s11671-015-0791-9

In this paper, a facile two-step Galvanic replacement reaction (GRR) is proposed to prepare Pt-Ag tubular dendritic nano-forests (tDNFs) in ambient condition for enhancing methanol oxidation reaction (MOR) under solar illumination. In the first GRR, a homogeneous layer of silver dendritic nano-forests (DNFs) with 10 μm in thickness was grown on Si wafer in 5 min in silver nitride (AgNO 3 ) and buffer oxide etchant (BOE) solution. In the second GRR, we utilized chloroplatinic acid (H 2 PtCl 6 ) as the precursor for platinum (Pt) deposition to further transform the prepared Ag DNFs into Pt-Ag tDNFs. The catalytic performance and solar response of the Pt-Ag tDNFs toward methanol electro-oxidation are also studied by cyclic voltammetry (CV) and chronoamperometry (CA). The methanol oxidation current was boosted by 6.4% under solar illumination on the Pt-Ag tDNFs due to the induced localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) on the dendritic structure. Current results provide a cost-effective and facile approach to prepare solar-driven metallic electrodes potentially applicable to photo-electro-chemical fuel cells.