Porous platinum mesoflowers with enhanced activity for methanol oxidation reaction

Porous Pt and Pt–Ag alloy mesoflowers (MFs) with about 2 μm in diameter and high porosity were synthesized using Ag mesoflowers as sacrificial template by galvanic reaction. The silver content in Pt–Ag alloys can be facilely controlled by nitric acid treatment. And the pure Pt MFs can be obtained by selective removal of silver element from Pt72Ag28 MFs electrochemically. Both Pt45Ag55, Pt72Ag28 and pure Pt show a high catalytic performance in methanol oxidation reaction (MOR). Especially, pure Pt MFs exhibited a 2 to 3 times current density enhancement in MOR compared with the commercial used Pt black, which can be attributed to their porous nanostructure with 3-dimentional nature and small crystal sizes.