Zhixue's paper has been accepted for publication in ACS Applied Energy Materials. Congratulations!

Title: Ultrathin Pt-Cu-Ni ternary alloy nanowires with multimetallic interplay for boosted methanol oxidation activity

Authors: Zhixue Zhang,† Miao Xie,† Zhaojun Liu, Yiming Lu, Shumeng Zhang, Moxuan Liu, Kai Liu, Tao Cheng* and Chuanbo Gao*

Link to the Publisher: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsaem.1c00952

Abstract: Controllably incorporating multiple non-noble metals into noble metal nanoparticles may greatly extend the degree to which the electronic structure and thus the catalytic activity of the nanoparticles could be engineered, which suffers from ineffective co-reduction of metals with different reduction potentials. In this work, we achieved the designable synthesis of such multimetallic alloy nanomaterials exemplified by ultrathin Pt-Cu-Ni ternary alloy nanowires by involving an electroless plating mechanism. Experiments and density functional theory (DFT) calculations show remarkable electronic coupling among the multiple alloy components. As a result, the Pt-Cu-Ni ternary alloy possesses even higher adsorption energy of *OH and even lower adsorption energy of *CO than any of the Pt-M (M = Cu, Ni) binary alloys, both being favorable for boosting the kinetics of the methanol oxidation reaction (MOR). The specific and mass activities of the ternary alloy nanowires well surpass those of the binary alloy counterparts and reach up to 7.4 mA cm–2 and 2.1 A mgPt¬–1, respectively, making them a top-ranked catalyst. The multimetallic electronic coupling further makes Cu, the major non-noble metal component, less prone to leaching, leading to improved stability. Our results showcase the intriguing catalytic properties by modifying the electronic structure of noble metal nanoparticles by multiple non-noble metal alloy components, which opens up opportunities in the design of highly efficient catalysts for the MOR and many other applications.