Stability and activity of platinum nanoparticles in the oxygen electroreduction reaction: is size or ordering of primary importance?

Platinum-carbon catalysts are widely used in manufacturing proton-exchange membrane fuel cells. Increasing Pt/C activity and stability is an urgent task, optimization of their structure seems to be one of the possible solutions.  In the present paper, Pt/C electrocatalysts which contained small (2 - 2.6 nm) nanoparticles of a similar size, uniformly distributed over the surface of a carbon support, were obtained by the original method of liquid-phase synthesis. A comparative study of the structural characteristics, catalytic activity in the oxygen electroreduction reaction and durability of the synthesized catalysts, as well as their commercial analogs has been carried out. It was shown that the ordering of the structural and morphological characteristics of Pt/C catalysts makes it possible to reduce the negative effect of NPs small size on their stability. As a result, the obtained catalysts are significantly superior to their commercial analogs in ORR activity, but not inferior to them in terms of stability.