Christophe Coutanceau

Platinum Activity for CO Electrooxidation: from Single Crystal Surfaces to Nanosurfaces and Real Fuel Cell Nanoparticles

The understanding of CO oxidation on platinum catalysts is a key point in several low-temperature fuel cell technologies: direct-alcohol fuel cells or proton-exchange membrane fuel cell fed with reformate hydrogen, for example. For this purpose, studies were carried out on different platinum surfaces, from single crystals surfaces with a well-defined orientation to platinum nanoparticle polyoriented surfaces. This article presents the CO electrooxidation on surfaces of Pt single crystals and Pt nanoparticles with different orientations and size ranges. The study of CO oxidation was completed with in situ reflectance spectroscopy coupled to electrochemical methods. The confrontation of CO oxidation behaviours observed on electrodes with oriented surfaces at macroscopic and nanoscopic size ranges allowed establishing a correlation between the surface structure and the CO oxidation voltammetric features.