Local Oxidation Induced Amorphization of 1.5-nm-Thick Pt-Ru Nanowires Enables Superactive and CO-Tolerant Hydrogen Oxidation in Alkaline Media

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 H-2/*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.