J. Mater. Sci. Technol. ›› 2019, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (8): 1601-1606.DOI: 10.1016/j.jmst.2019.03.020

• Orginal Article • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Preparation of nanostructured Cu/Zr metal mixed oxides via self-sustained oxidation of a CuZr binary amorphous alloy

Xingzhou Li, Jili Wu, Ye Pan*()   

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Advance Metallic Materials, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China
  • Received:2018-10-16 Revised:2018-12-31 Accepted:2019-02-15 Online:2019-08-05 Published:2019-06-19
  • Contact: Pan Ye
  • About author:

    1 These authors contributed equally to this work.

Abstract:

We propose and demonstrate for the first time an approach to synthesize nanostructured photocatalysts through combustion of metal alloys in amorphous state. This approach takes advantage of metastable state and composition homogeneity of amorphous alloys and produce photocatalysts with uniformly dispersed oxides at nanoscale by self-propagating reactions. Using CuZr amorphous ribbons as an example, we demonstrate a photocatalyst containing copper oxides and ZrO2 in the form of 10 nm-thick nanosheet with 2 nm nanopores. The new catalyst substantially outperforms those previously reported copper oxide catalysts in experiments of photocatalytic degradation of methylene blue and direct methanol fuel cells. This study opens up an avenue to fabricate nanostructured functional oxides in an environment friendly approach not only for photocatalyst but also for oxide based nanoelectronic and nanoionic applications.

Key words: Amorphous alloys, Cuprous oxide, Degradation, Oxidation