  The current density at lower potential is highly desirable in fuel cell
technology and crucial center point for designing a new catalyst. By alloying
platinum with various other metals, the improvisation of the fuel cell catalyst
has achieved a lot of attention and interests. In this article, a novel porous
ternary alloy PtPb@Ru as anode catalysts for direct methanol fuel cell had been
synthesized by micro-emulsion technique. The catalysts had been characterized
by various spectroscopic and microscopic techniques. The activity and
durability of the catalysts had been tested by running cyclic voltammetry in
0.1 M HClO4 and 1M Methanol. To explain the many fold increase in current
density of the PtPb@Ru catalysts in comparison to the commercial available PtRu
catalysts, in situ X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) measurements, at the
PtL3 edge (XANES and EXAFS) were carried out on the PtPb@Ru catalysts in an
electrochemical cell. The down-shift in the d-band center of platinum observed
in the XAS study, might be responsible for the better activity and high current
density observed here.
