ISSN: 1755-5310 (Electronic)1755-5302 (Print)

Interventional Cardiology

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 Polymer electrolyte fuel cells (PEFC) are widely investigated, because they are promising alternatives to petroleum-based energy sources due to their high efficiency, high power density, low emission, and low operating temperature . However, there are still many challenges to be tackled before PEFCs can be commercialized. One of them is to find a sufficiently active and cost-effective catalyst for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). Nowadays Pt is used as a cathode catalyst, but the insufficient activity and high cost prevent its large-scale applications. TiO2 is a possible candidate owing to its high stability in acidic media. It has been used in several experiments as ORR catalyst itself  and also combined with other materials . These results show that the activity of pure TiO2 rutile is moderate compared to Pt, but it can be increased with doping  or introducing defects on the surface . Among the different crystal planes, the highest activity was attributed to the (1 1 0) plane , thus, in this work, we will focus on the TiO2 rutile (1 1 0) surface. However, it should be mentioned that stability superior to the Pt/C catalyst and increased activity were also found introducing defects on the TiO2 anatase (001) surface . On the TiO2 rutile (1 1 0) surface, the Ti atoms are either six- or fivefold coordinated. Furthermore, the O atoms are either threefold coordinated in the plane of the surface or twofold coordinated bridging atoms prominent from the surface. Several studies deal with the surface properties of rutile, especially with the adsorption of H2O and with the adsorption of small molecules on it such as water or oxygen. The water adsorption follows an associative mechanism according to the experiments on the pure surface, while it follows a dissociative mechanism at bridging oxygen vacancies, the most common defect on this surface, leading to the formation of bridging hydroxyl groups   

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