Metal nanomaterials are one major class of enablers for clean technology. For example, they play vital roles as electrocatalysts in fuel cells and electrochemical sensors. Despite great efforts from world-wide, the commercialization of metal electrocatalysts based devices still meet critical challenges including high cost, insufficient activity, and low durability. Therefore, it is of great interests to explore the factors that influence the electrocatalytic activity and durability of the metallic electrocatalysts, and to develop simple strategies to generate high performance metallic electrocatalysts.

We have developed facile spontaneous methods including one-step spontaneous gelation method in combination with galvanic replacement reaction and fabricated a series of self supported metallic aerogels with extended metal backbone nanostructures of nanowire or nanotubular networks and very high surface area and large porosity.[1-5] In addition, supported metal nanostructure have been also obtained and self-assembled on electrodes.[6,7] These materials were utilized as high performance electrocatalysts in fuel cell anode and cathode reactions and in electrochemical sensors. Our results show that porous structure, metal composition and support material have great influences on the electrocatalytic activity of metal nanomaterials.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the financial supports from the 100Top Talents Program - Sun Yat-sen University (P.R. China), theEuropean Commission (Brussels) for the Marie Curie Research Fel-lowship for Transfer of Knowledge (No. MTKD-CT-2006-042637)and from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. Financial supportsfrom the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the EuropeanResearch Council (ERC-2013-AdG AEROCAT) a gratefully acknowl-edged.

References

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