Extended Data: Structure-dependence of the atomic-scale mechanisms of Pt electrooxidation and dissolution

Abstract:

Platinum dissolution and restructuring due to surface oxidation are primary degradation mechanisms that limit the lifetime of Pt-based electrocatalysts for electrochemical energy conversion. Here, we studied well-defined Pt(100) and Pt(111) electrode surfaces by in situ high-energy surface X-ray diffraction, on-line inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, and density functional theory calculations, to elucidate the atomic-scale mechanisms of these processes. The locations of the extracted Pt atoms after Pt(100) oxidation reveal distinct differences from the Pt(111) case, which explains the different surface stability. The evolution of a specific stripe oxide structure on Pt(100) produces unstable surface atoms which are prone to dissolution and restructuring, leading to one order of magnitude higher dissolution rates.

Contents of this repository:

1. SXRD data:

The experiments for the acquisition of the raw SXRD data were performed at the the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Grenoble, France at the beamlines ID31 and ID03. We thank H. Isern and T. Dufrane for the help during the SXRD experiments.

• tomo_tomo.spec is the file with the X-ray diffraction metadata for the CTR scans. It is a plain text file.
• Each HESXRD dataset is saved in a folder, which denotes the potential (e.g. 1V0.zip). The png-image files are previews of the corresponding dataset. The individual raw cbf files can be opened by pyMCA or silx. From python, the images can be accessed using the fabio library.
• calibration.zip contains the pyFAI calibration files and a list with indexed Bragg reflections for the UB matrix calculation
• CTRs_parameters.zip contains the averaged CTR structure factors used for the structual analysis as well as files with the atomic coordinates of the refined structural model.
• steps.zip contains the full datasets from the potential step experiments in Fig. 1e.

2. DFT:

• CONTCARs.zip contains the atomic coordinates of the optimized computational models.