Synthesis of carbon cloth/NiO nanoflakes/Pd nanoparticles as direct ethanol fuel cell anode in alkaline medium

Environmental considerations are always an important challenge in the development of communities and progress direction. Therefore it is tried to continue the developments through appropriate path direction with this considerations. One of them which locate fuel cells in the center of attention is decreasing or stop the generation of greenhouse gases due to the electrical energy generations. In this way fuel cells are faced with some challenges such as requiring to high-cost catalysts (platinum [1], palladium [2] etc), moreover, another challenge is conservation of available sources of these metals for future and more efficient applications. So researchers are trying to develop the lower cost and more efficient catalysts by using of abundant materials or reducing the loading of high-cost catalysts. In this study, for the first time, NiO nanoflakes were synthesized by dual step galvanostatic method on carbon cloth (CC) substrate in a short time and then Pd nanoparticles were decorated on NiO by cyclic voltammetry method. This composite (Pd-NiO/CC) was used as an anode for ethanol oxidation reaction (EOR) in alkaline media. Results showed compare to CC, Pd/CC, and NiO/CC, the proposed composite has the highest performance for EOR. Therefore Pd-NiO/CC can be a favorable anode for ethanol in direct ethanol fuel cells (DEFCs).