The Anchored Pt and/or Pt Alloy Nanoparticles on substrates

From Platinum film to platinum nanoparticles, the reduction of Platinum as hydrogen fuel cell catalyst has been a great success. However, the further reduction of Pt nanoparticle (NP) size has been limited as many researches reported the optimized size of Pt-NPs is around 4-6 nanometer. The other known facts are that most catalytic reactions occur on the surface of the catalyst, in which the active sites are the other critical factor to the catalytic activity. Mathematically, for any spherical NPs at 5 nm, , the majority weight of Pt of these NPs are not utilized by surface reaction. A critical question is whether there is a technology that can prepare a thin coating on the nano-meter size support at a desirable dimension to exert same excellent electrochemcial catalytic activity as those Pt material on the spherical NPs. Most known Pt NPs prepared by one-pot synthesis methods are spherical. Others possess special geometries through a specified preparation process. However, none of them has claimed to be able to deposit on a carbon support a uniform plate-shape Pt NPs at size from a few nanometers to 20 nanometers. Much large and thick plates were reported. Blue-O Tech has successfully developed and produced innovative plat-shape Pt containing NPs on carbon supports including Cabot XC-72R and nano-graphite. This innovation has been protected by a PCT patent application. The advantages of such plate-shape Pt containing NPs includes: 1. The ability to develop ultra-low loading of Pt-containing catalysts 2. The ability to form more active sites produced by co-growth of subnanometer NPs in a plate shape structure 3. The ability to form plate-shaped Pt-Alloy NPs 4. The ability to anchor the novel NPs on support 5. Extreme High Purity Pt-containing composition

Platinum has been used for hydrogen fuel cell battery over decades.  The main reason is that platinum catalyst has been the most active and durable catalysts for hydrogen fuel cell application.  Finding ultra-low loading of platinum catalyst has been the top research topic.  Various means have been developed to reduce Platinum loading on various supports.  There have been various barriers for the commercialization of some advanced technologies that produce desirable Platinum containing catalysts due to the large capital investment and/or high operation cost.  The other vital commercial requirement is the durability of the catalysts.  Various researches have focused on to bond Pt NPs on the surface of various catalyst supports.  One purpose of this improvement is to reduce the migration of Pt NPs that leads to form large particles, which will reduce the catalytic surface area to have a lower catalytic activity.  
The third key challenge is the tolerance of the catalysts with some impurities like low carbon monoxide (CO) , which is a common component in a low grade hydrogen gas.  Many Pt containing alloys have been developed to combat this problem.  Among them, Pt-Pd alloy has been found to have excellent performance for both catalytic activity and tolerance to CO poisoning.  
There is no known Pt containing catalyst(s) that can combat above three difficulties at same time.  Blue-O Tech has developed novel Pt-containing catalysts by using a novel process that addresses above all three key questions.  Blue-O Tech is undergoing a scale up development of their PCT patent pending nanocatalysts.  Blue-O Tech welcomes any company who are interested in our technology to contact us. 
Many reserachers have been done to improve the bonding between the Pt NPs on various supports including various carbon support.   One method used to improve the bonding between Pt on carbon support is to oxidize partially carbons support surface, which involves using highly concentrated acid at elevated temperature, which pose many work hazards and post treatment difficulties, even potential environmental concerns  The oxidized sites on the support surface cannot be well controlled, nor always uniform.  Blue-O Tech employees a process that produce uniform deposition of Pt-containing NPs on the support surface.  More importantly, Blue-O Tech patent pending process has a proven mechanism of anchoring the NPs on the support surfaces, which is much stronger than the bonding between a oxidized carbon surface with metallic Pt-Nps prepared by many other one-pot synthesis reaction.  The migration or diffusion of these Pt NPs from such oxidized carbon support were often observed in the proton exchange membrane after durability testing.  HRTEM images showed that the produced NPs remained on the support surface after a standard durability test. No aggregation of NPs were observed at all.  (Please contact us to learn more scientific details of this innovation. )