In advanced polymer electrolyte membrane water electrolysis, low-load membrane electrode assemblies will be used to meet the requirements associated with the intended large-scale deployment.¹ In particular, the scarcity of iridium pressurizes the need to develop long-life, low-loaded iridium anodes without compromising performance.² To obtain highly durable electrodes, the understanding of the impact of the electrode structure on the degradation mechanisms caused by intermittent and stationary operation is essential. By varying machine parameters of the spray coater, we were able to understand the interaction between the spray parameters and the morphology of the fabricated electrodes, while approaches for clustering and dimensionality reduction helped us to correlate surface properties with statistical image variables. This allowed us to design several reference electrodes (Figure 1) with different artefacts related to loadings displacement (MP1 to MP5), analyzed them with static and dynamic degradation protocols to evaluate the importance of basic electrode fabrication on their degradation pathway.

Acknowledgement

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the PROMET-H2 grant agreement No 862253.

References

1. Z. Taie, X. Peng, D. Kulkarni, I. V. Zenyuk, A. Z. Weber, C. Hagen and N. Danilovic, ACS Appl Mater Interfaces, 2020, 12, 52701-52712.
2. S. M. Alia, S. Stariha and R. L. Borup, Journal of The Electrochemical Society, 2019, 166, F1164-F1172.