High-temperature polymer electrolyte fuel cells (HT-PEMFCs) have advantages in enhanced fuel impurities tolerance, easier heat rejection, and simpler water management^[1]. Low-temperature PEMFCs with perfluorosulfonic acid electrolytes (e.g., Nafion) could not provide sufficient proton conductivity in the absence of water when T > 120 °C, limiting the application when a higher temperature is desired. High-temperature (HT-) PEMFCs have been developed by using phosphoric acid (H₃PO₄)-doped polymer electrolyte (e.g., polybenzimidazole, quaternary ammonium biphosphate ion pair coordinated polyphenylene, etc.) ^[2-4], where H₃PO₄ can conduct proton at high temperature up to 200 °C. Such change of the reaction environment, however, also affects oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) kinetics. Despite of a facilitated reaction kinetics under high temperature, a high Pt loading is still demanded in state-of-the-art HT-PEMFCs. To enhance ORR activity and increase Pt utilization, here we employ a strategy to alloy Pt with another transition metal (M), which has been demonstrated to be effective in LT-PEMFCs. In this study, Pt and Pt-M catalysts were used to investigate the alloy effect on the adsorption strength of H₃PO₄ and ORR in both half-cell rotating disk electrode (RDE) and membrane electrode assembly (MEA). In RDE study, the competition adsorption of phosphoric acid has led to a suppression on ORR activity on all catalysts, with less impact on ORR at 160 °C using pure H₃PO₄ than RT using 1 M H₃PO₄. Since alloying not just affects the O binding energy, but also H₃PO₄ adsorption, a different trend of ORR on Pt-M alloy catalysts was resulted in the presence of H₃PO_4. The alloy effect was further studied in MEA at 160 °C, which also indicates the effectiveness of using HT-RDE setup for HT-ORR catalyst screening.

Reference:

[1] Gittleman, C. S.; Jia, H.; De Castro, E. S.; Chisholm, C. R. I.; Kim, Y. S. Proton Conductors for Heavy-Duty Vehicle Fuel Cells. Joule 2021, 5 (7), 1660–1677.

[2] Pingitore, A. T.; Huang, F.; Qian, G.; Benicewicz, B. C. Durable High Polymer Content m/ p-Polybenzimidazole Membranes for Extended Lifetime Electrochemical Devices. ACS Appl. Energy Mater. 2019, 2 (3), 1720–1726.

[3] Lee, K. S.; Spendelow, J. S.; Choe, Y. K.; Fujimoto, C.; Kim, Y. S. An Operationally Flexible Fuel Cell Based on Quaternary Ammonium-Biphosphate Ion Pairs. Nat. Energy 2016, 1 (9).

[4] Lim, K. H.; Lee, A. S.; Atanasov, V.; Kerres, J.; Park, E. J.; Adhikari, S.; Maurya, S.; Manriquez, L. D.; Jung, J.; Fujimoto, C.; Matanovic, I.; Jankovic, J.; Hu, Z.; Jia, H.; Kim, Y. S. Protonated Phosphonic Acid Electrodes for High Power Heavy-Duty Vehicle Fuel Cells. Nat. Energy 2022, 7 (3), 248–259.