Assembling molybdenum-doped platinum clusters into a coral-like nanostructure for highly enhanced oxygen reduction

Regulating the electronic and geometric structures of electrocatalysts is an effective strategy to boost their catalytic properties.Herein,a coral-like nanostructure is assembled with Mo-doped Pt clusters to form a highly active catalyst toward the oxygen reduction reaction(ORR).The advantages of a Mo-doped porous skeleton,grain boundaries,and MoOx species on the Pt cluster surfaces synergistically boost the electrocatalytic performance.This unique architecture delivers 3.5-and 2.8-fold higher mass and specific activities,respectively,than commercial Pt/C.Density functional theory calculations reveal that the Mo-doped Pt clusters have an optimized Pt–O bond length of 2.110Å,which weakens the adsorption energy of the intermediate O*to yield great ORR activity.Moreover,the catalyst shows a decay in the half-wave potential of only 8 mV after 10,000 cycles of accelerated durability testing.The high stability arises from the increased dissociation energy of Pt atoms and the stable architecture of the coral-like structure of clusters.