The fuel cell belongs to a green energy technology, while the key material is the important factor which restricts its widely application, which is the catalyst using a large amount of precious metal, with not high activity, and the stability can not meet the application requirements, all these factors restrict its development in terms of cost. Proton exchange membrane fuel cell is concerned a lot due to its high efficiency, safety and environmental and other advantages. Tungsten trioxide and tungsten carbide is relatively stable in a fuel cell environment, also it has synergistic effect with the metal catalyst, and make it the ideal alternative carrier of carbon.

 

Studies showed that the reason that tungsten oxide has the ideal proton conductivity is because of the formation of WO₃ hydrate, which is attractive for it applied in the fuel cell catalyst carrier. Tungsten trioxide has been proven to be more stable than Vulcan XC-72R on the thermodynamically under the conditions of electrochemical oxidation. In view of the too small specific surface area of tungsten trioxide which limits the dispersion of metal catalyst, with the enhancing of preparing ability, the microspheres, mesoporous and nano tungsten trioxide has higher stability and surface area than the conventional tungsten oxide, which expresses a better performance.

 

WO₃ can enhance the catalytic oxidation of Pt on methanol, mainly because WO₃ is formed to the tungsten bronze, thus contributing to the dehydrogenation reaction of methanol and also oxygen affinity of tungsten oxide helps to remove the intermediate product of methanol oxidation which is adsorbed on the catalyst. The study found that the tungsten trioxide platinum catalyst activity is higher than the commercial Pt-Ru/C. compared to Pt / C catalysts, Pt / WO₃ with 20% of tungsten oxide has significantly higher in the catalytic activity for methanol oxidation and electrochemical stability. In addition, Gui and their team prepared Pt-WO₃/C catalyst by absorbing on the carbon and the decomposition of phosphotungstic acid, in the CO stripping experiments, they found this kind of catalyst showed better CO oxidation, which suggests that the anti-CO poisoning capacity of Pt-WO₃/ C is stronger than Pt / C.