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Low‐dimensional amorphous metallic nanomaterials provide great possibility for creating high‐performance electrocatalysts owing to their conspicuous reacting merits derived from the flexible coordination structures, but remain extremely challenging in synthesis. Herein, this work reports a facile synthesis of carbon‐loaded amorphous 1.5‐nm‐thick Pt–Ru nanowires (NWs) through a local oxidation induced amorphization process. During annealing premade crystalline Pt–Ru NWs/C in air, a local‐oxidation of the oxyphilic Ru generates abundant random Ru–O bonds and disturbs the order bimetallic lattices. The as‐prepared amorphous Pt53Ru47 (a‐Pt53Ru47) NWs/C exhibits an extremely high activity (13.7 A mg−1 at 25 mV overpotential) and an excellent CO‐tolerance for alkaline hydrogen oxidation reaction (HOR) electrocatalysis, drastically outperforming the crystalline counterpart and commercial benchmarks. Mechanism studies indicate the Pt–Ru bimetallic effects as well as the rich disordered "Pt–Ru–O" and/or "Pt–O–Ru" atomic heterojunctions can weaken the *H binding energy and inversely strengthen the *OH adsorption, thus promoting the alkaline HOR kinetics. More uniquely, the small interatomic spaces derived from the disordered bond nets present a H2/*H‐selected permeability, which spatially obstruct the relatively larger CO molecules to poison the internal catalytic sites during HOR. The CO‐shielded internal catalytic sites and the enriched surface *OH jointly upgrade the CO‐tolerance of the a‐Pt53Ru47 NWs/C catalysts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Architectural engineering of noble metal nanocrystals can result in structural diversity and complexity, thereby providing catalysts with multifunctional properties. Herein, a unique Sierpinski gasket-like Pt–Ag octahedral alloy nanostructure with a three-dimensional hyperbranched architecture containing abundant well-defined Pt-rich {111} stable facets and dense low-coordinated active sites is reported. Unlike the well-accepted long-range limiting diffusion govened growth model for fractal structures, our success relies on creating local depletion layer near the crystal surface by surfactant. The as-prepared Sierpinski gasket-like Pt–Ag octahedral nanocrystals allows us to achieve three milestones for electrocatalysts, i.e. high catalytic activity, great durability, and stability towards the methanol oxidation reaction in acidic media. Specifically, the catalyst shows a high specific activity (6.61 mA cm−2, is superior than most of reported Pt-based catalysts), outstanding CO ads -poisoning tolerance and stability (the morphology and composition of the catalyst are preserved after 2000 cycles). This study points to a new approach to develop highly efficient catalysts in the form of fractal nanostructures with structural diversity and complexity to balance the delicate trade-off between activity and stability of catalysts. Image 1 • A new kind of three-dimensional fractal Sierpinski gasket-like octahedral Pt-Ag alloy nanocrystals are synthetized. • A new synthetic strategy for fractal structures based on surfactant induced local diffusion-limited growth was developed. • They achieve high activity, great durability and stability simultaneously towards the methanol oxidation in acidic meida. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Icosahedra have small contact areas during packing, leading small icosahedral Pt nanoparticles to highly disperse on carbon nanotubes (CNT). The as-synthesized highly monodispersed Pt icosahedra on CNT exhibited superior catalytic activity and structural stability to their Pt nanocube counterparts on CNT towards methanol electro-oxidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Excavated polyhedral noble-metal materials that were built by the orderly assembly of ultrathin nanosheets have both large surface areas and well-defined facets, and therefore could be promising candidates for diverse important applications. In this work, excavated cubic Pt-Sn alloy nanocrystals (NCs) with {110} facets were constructed from twelve nanosheets by a simple co-reduction method with the assistance of the surface regulator polyvinylpyrrolidone. The specific surface area of the excavated cubic Pt-Sn NCs is comparable to that of commercial Pt black despite their larger particle size. The excavated cubic Pt-Sn NCs exhibited superior electrocatalytic activity in terms of both the specific area current density and the mass current density towards methanol oxidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rational synthesis of bimetallic alloy nanocrystals (NCs) is still a great challenge. Especially, spatially uniform alloy NCs are very difficult to achieve because of the different reduction rates of the individual alloy components. Herein we propose a facile wet chemical synthetic strategy to prepare uniform bimetallic alloy NCs with tunable composition by controlling the growth of alloy NCs under diffusion controlled conditions. Using this strategy, we successfully synthesized trisoctahedral (TOH) Au-Pd alloy NCs enclosed by { hhl} high-index facets with uniform spatial distributions and different compositions. Significantly, using our strategy, the composition of the as-prepared Au-Pd alloy NCs is identical to the ratio of the two metal precursors in the reaction solution over a wide range. Investigation of the composition-dependent electrochemical behavior of the as-prepared TOH Au-Pd alloy NCs showed that the TOH Au-Pd alloy NCs containing 14.1 atom% Pd exhibited the best activity. [Figure not available: see fulltext.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]