07/06/2015: A New Paper from TongLab has been published on the Early View website of Angewandt Chemie International Edition

Post date: Jul 07, 2015 12:43:56 AM

A paper entitled "Irrelevance of CO Poisoning in Methanol Oxidation Reaction on a PtRu Electrocatalyst" by Dejun Chen and YuYe J. Tong has been published on the Early View website of Angewandt Chemie International Edition. The paper revisited the widely accepted Watanabe–Motoo bifunctional mechanism for methanol oxidation enhancement on a PtRu electrocatalyst. Based on detailed in situ attenuated total-reflection–surface-enhanced IR reflection absorption spectroscopy (ATR-SEIRAS) studies of the methanol oxidation reaction (MOR) on Ru/Pt thin film and commercial Johnson–Matthey PtRu/C, a revised MOR enhancement mechanism is proposed in which CO on Pt sites is irrelevant but instead Pt-Ru boundary sites catalyze the oxygen insertion reaction that leads to the formation of formate and enhances the direct reaction pathway. It is expected that the newly proposed reaction mechanism will have broad ramifications in designing better CO-poisoning tolerant electrocatalysts for MOR.