Abstract
In this paper, a facile two-step Galvanic replacement reaction (GRR) is proposed to prepare Pt-Ag tubular dendritic nano-forests (tDNFs) in ambient condition for enhancing methanol oxidation reaction (MOR) under solar illumination. In the first GRR, a homogeneous layer of silver dendritic nano-forests (DNFs) with 10 μm in thickness was grown on Si wafer in 5 min in silver nitride (AgNO 3 ) and buffer oxide etchant (BOE) solution. In the second GRR, we utilized chloroplatinic acid (H 2 PtCl 6 ) as the precursor for platinum (Pt) deposition to further transform the prepared Ag DNFs into Pt-Ag tDNFs. The catalytic performance and solar response of the Pt-Ag tDNFs toward methanol electro-oxidation are also studied by cyclic voltammetry (CV) and chronoamperometry (CA). The methanol oxidation current was boosted by 6.4% under solar illumination on the Pt-Ag tDNFs due to the induced localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) on the dendritic structure. Current results provide a cost-effective and facile approach to prepare solar-driven metallic electrodes potentially applicable to photo-electro-chemical fuel cells.