Driving up the Electrocatalytic Performance for Carbon Dioxide Conversion through Interface Tuning in Graphene Oxide-Bismuth Oxide Nanocomposites.

The integration of graphene oxide (GO) into nanostructured BiO electrocatalysts for CO reduction (CORR) brings up remarkable improvements in terms of performance toward formic acid (HCOOH) production. The GO scaffold is able to facilitate electron transfers toward the active BiO phase, amending for the high metal oxide (MO) intrinsic electric resistance, resulting in activation of the CO with smaller overpotential. Herein, the structure of the GO-MO nanocomposite is tailored according to two synthetic protocols, giving rise to two different nanostructures, one featuring reduced GO (rGO) supporting Bi@BiO core-shell nanoparticles (NP) and the other GO supporting fully oxidized BiO NP.

Carbon supported noble metal nanoparticles as efficient catalysts for electrochemical water splitting.

Due to an increasing requirement of clean and sustainable hydrogen energy economy, it is significant to develop new highly effective catalysts for electrochemical water splitting. In alkaline electrolyte, Platinum (Pt) shows a much slower hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) kinetics relative to acidic condition. Here, we show a versatile synthetic approach for combining different noble metals, such as Rhodium (Rh), RhPt and Pt nanoparticles, with carbon forming noble metal nanoparticles/nanocarbon composites, denoted as Rh(nP)/nC, RhPt(nP)/nC and Pt(nP)/nC, respectively.