The high cost and limited supply of platinum demands its efficient commercial usage, a problem which can be addressed by the manipulation of the size and shape of platinum materials at the nanoscale. Patents and patents pending describe the growth of platinum and palladium nanostructures using various templates and supports, including various surfactant assemblies, water/oil emulsions, silica and Latex nanostructures. Control of the metal growth is achieved by the use of porphyrin-based photocatalysts to reduce platinum complexes using UV-visible light and thereby forming platinum nanoparticle seeds from which the Pt and Pd nanostructures grow. Various platinum nanostructures with size and shape control can be produced, including globular nanodendrites, flat dendritic nanosheets, foam-like nanospheres, porous nanocages, and hollow nanospheres. These Pt and Pd nanostructures have been synthesized by associating the porphyrin photocatalysts with a series of templating structures. The porphyrin molecules are capable of rapidly reducing the aqueous metal salt into a tunable number of initial seed particles under white light irradiation. This provides nearly equal growth times for each seed leading to final products with uniform and predictable sizes. The shape control over the Pt nanostructures is realized by the usage of various templates such as surfactant micelles, multilamellar vesicles, liposomal aggregates, unilamellar liposomes, nanodroplets, bicelles, and polystyrene nanobeads. Several of these platinum nanostructures, with/without the use of photocatalysts, were shown to be active for hydrogen generation systems or for sintering-resistant electrocatalysts in fuel cells. Nanostructured platinum materials are of particular interest in many technological applications, but especially as electrocatalysts in proton exchange membrane fuel cells and as catalysts in many reactions such as those employed in solar water-splitting devices.Sandia National Laboratories is seeking partnership relationships, consisting of dual license and CRADA agreements to further enable commercialization of these platinum nanostructures. The successful partner(s) will have demonstrated ability in developing and bringing to market novel nanostructured materials such as those described herein. Point of Contact: Rudolph R. Griego, Administrator, Phone (505) 844-7522, Email
[email protected]