Hello Santimoy.

Indeed it is not easy to assess of ECSA of bi- and trimetallic alloys. Usually, for Pt and Pd alloys the community uses Hupd based ECSA or CO-based ECSA. However it still unclear, how for example CO affect the catalytic structure of the material. In my former publication i could show, that CO change the metallic ratio of Pt to non-noble metal. That means you have to present different ECSA methods, because noone of them is the best. As soon as you can measure ECSA in different ways i would prefer to see the whole data package. 

In case you have oxide materials, the Hupd-based ECSA is possibly not applicable. So, i think you should use CO-stripping measurements (ECSA) or TPD measurements (only surface area of catalyst).

Best

Hi. I completely agree with Stefan. Actually he published a nice article last year discussing it (you have the link bellow).

I my opinion all of us should show our results normalizing the currents in as many ways as possible, otherwise, we are just "telling our story" and that is not good for our field development.

Yes, I agree that sometimes it is clearly more useful to divide currents by active sites and sometimes by dollar (and not by Pt if the other metal contribute more to the total cost than Pt).

Finally, it is almost impossible to determine the catalyst area, but if you are comparing materials that are not very different it could be not be difficult to compare their relative areas whether you use the same method to all of them.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12678-014-0205-2

Thanks Stefan Rudi for your suggestion. In addition to your suggestion I want to know is there standard protocol to measure TPD for a oxide material which could be used as electrocatalyst in different application.

There is no standard protocol. The protocol is depending on your material and adsorption gas you want to use. Typically, the most used gases are CO and NO. First, you have to go to low temperature that the adsorption gas could be adsorbed on the catalyst surface. Here you should remind yourself that is possible to adsorb more than one monolayer. Then you have to raise the temerature in constant heating rate (something between 2-5 °C/s) until your gas is completely desorbed. Then you have the evaluate the data (the good publication A.M. de JONG and J.W. NIEMANTSVERDRIET, Surface Science 233 (1990) 355-365 would help you).

As Pablo said, try to give more information of surface area measured with different techniques and compare them to the state-of-the-art or other benchmark materials.

Best

Suggest reviewing the following paper:

Article Cobalt-Doped Pd@Pt Core–Shell Nanoparticles: A Correlative S...