Near-infrared light-assisted methanol oxidation reaction over the ferrous phosphide.

Ferrous phosphide (FeP) possesses both functions of near-infrared light (NIR) responsive and metal-support interactional behaviors, which will show great significance in photo-assisted electrocatalytic methanol oxidation reaction (MOR) areas. Hereby, we use FeP as the support to load Pt nanoparticles and investigate the performance of the as-obtained Pt-FeP for MOR. The results show that the synergistic effect of photocatalysis and electrocatalysis contributes to the high-performance MOR, especially under NIR irradiation. The as-obtained Pt-FeP also shows excellent photoelectric response performance and long-time stability of photo-electrocatalytic activity with the assistance of NIR illumination. The mass activities of the Pt-FeP catalysts with the assistance of NIR towards MOR is 2430.0 mA mg, 4.7 times superior to the dark condition (521.1 mA mg), which is obviously better than that of traditional electrocatalysts and some reported photo-electrocatalysts. The strong metal-support interaction between Pt and FeP together with NIR excited hot electrons from FeP result in the above superior photo-electrocatalytic methanol oxidation abilities. The present investigation offers a NIR-assisted electrocatalytic MOR strategy, which may be a feasible approach to further elevate the catalytic performance for MOR in photo-assisted direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs).