Nickel Flower/Conducting Polymer Composite for Effective Ethanol Electrooxidation in Alkaline Medium

The growing interest in energy demand became an important issue for several sectors like industry and transportation. Recently, fuel cells generated a new solution for global energy deficiency. Therefore, we developed a new catalyst for fuel cell applications that included nickel oxide nanoflower with polyaniline to enhance the electrooxidation of ethanol. The structure of the modified electrode was characterized by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and infrared spectroscopy (IR). At the same time, surface morphology and structural thermal stability were utilized by Scanning electron spectroscopy (SEM) and Thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA), respectively. Otherwise, ethanol electrooxidation was studied by several electrochemistry techniques like cyclic voltammetry (CVs) and chronoamperometry (CA). The activity of the electrocatalyst toward ethanol conversion reached 32 mA cm⁻² at a potential of 0.46 V (vs. Ag/AgCl). The effect of changing the thickness of the conducting polymer was studied to find out the optimum catalysis condition. Several chemical kinetics were calculated, like diffusion coefficient (D), Tafel slope, and transfer coefficient. The long-term stability of the modified electrode for 240 min. Whereas the anodic current decreased by 15% after continuous oxidation of ethanol in an alkaline medium.

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