Recently, there has been growing interest in development of electrochemical energy conversion systems utilizing small organic molecules as alternative technologies to hydrogen based fuel cells. Such organic molecules as methanol, ethanol or isopropanol can be ideally oxidized to carbon dioxide.  But realistically the reactions are rather slow at ambient conditions. Obviously, there is a need to develop novel electrocatalytic materials.

Platinum has been recognized as the most active catalytic metal towards oxidation of alcohols at low and moderate temperatures. But Pt anodes are readily poisoned by the strongly adsorbed intermediates, namely by CO-type species, requiring fairly high overpotentials for their removal. Up to now lot of materials have been tested as electrocatalysts for small organic molecules in acidic media, such as Pt, its alloys Pt–M (M= Ru, Sn, Rh, Pb, Ir, W or Mo) in binary or ternary form and even different methods to prepare Pt thin film electrodes. Complete oxidation of alcohols into CO₂ via C–C bond cleavage is mechanistically difficult at ambient (low) temperature, and the surface of catalytic platinum readily undergoes poisoning with intermediates of the alcohols oxidation. This problem may be partially solved by applying bifunctional electrocatalysts. In general, metals, like ruthenium, tin or rod are oxophilic, which provide oxygen at low potentials and mitigates the poisoning effect by oxidizing the metastable intermediates with adsorbed water fragments.

In order to increase the overall kinetic of electrooxidation of isopropanol, we have utilized as carriers (matrices) carbon nanotubes (CNTs) modified with the cesium salt of Keggin-type heteropolyacids of molybdenum and tungsten (Cs_2.5H_0.5PMo₁₂O₄₀, Cs_2.5H_0.5PW₁₂O₄₀) or metal oxide (MoO₃, ZrO₂, CeO₂, IrO₂). The presence of metals oxide and cesium salt are capable of generating of interfacial reactive hydroxy groups on the surfaces and also increase the catalytic surface. Remarkable increases of electrocatalytic currents measured under voltammetric and chronoamperometric conditions have been observed. Electrochemical diagnostic experiments have been supported with microscopic monitoring of morphology using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and ATR-FTIR measurements.