The main goal of this work is to synthetize and characterize new and innovative ceramic materials that can be used for energetic catalysis. The work is split in two main branches, the first one focused on TiOxCy ceramics, the second one on Max phases. Both of them appear to be excellent anodic materials for fuel cells, with the first one specifically developed within the European DECORE Project.
The titanium oxycarbide was developed to work at the anode of direct ethanol fuel cells because of its predicted stability in acidic and moderate high temperature ambient. The initial requirements that have to be satisfied for the European project were to have a pure powder with high surface area, that can be scaled easily to industrial scale. Several and different paths were used to satisfy and outdo the starting requirements, obtaining a process and the resulting powder that show excellent results in terms of purity, surface area, reproducibility and scalability. All of the requirements were fully satisfied. New catalysts were also synthetized to optimize the efficiency of the anode, using platinum and platinum-tin nanoparticles. Especially the latter showed very promising results, that have to be further analysed with more complete and in-depth experiments.
The Max phases are a class of innovative ceramics with nanolamitated structures. They mix the best properties of the ceramics, like acid and high temperature resistance, with the best ones of the metals, as electrical conductivity and malleability. They were studied in the last two decades, but few works aimed to discover their utility in fuel cells. Due to their very promising qualities we tried to produce them for future works aimed to use them as catalyst support. We concentrated our work on Ti3SiC2, Ti2AlC and Ti3AlC2 due to their ease of synthesis, but we obtained pure powders barely, so additional and further studies are needed. On that powders, we made a preliminary study on the feasibility of decoration with platinum nanoparticles and on the electrochemical behaviour in mild conditions. The results were promising, but require more experiments
