High temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cells (HT-PEMFCs) offer significant advantages over PEMFCs operating below 100 °C including the lack of need for humidifiers and smaller radiator sizes due to simplified thermal management, potentially providing a solution to vastly reduce the cost of fuel cells and their application to automobiles.¹ Polymer electrolytes based on phosphoric acid-doped polybenzimidazole have given decent fuel cell performance, but suffer from stability issues stemming from the leaching of the liquid phosphoric acid carrier electrolyte at either lower temperatures or when exposed to water.² While our previous development of ion-pair coordinated electrolyte systems improved the versatility of fuel cell operation temperature,³ this study investigates the optimization of HT-PEMFC performance through various electrodes formulation with a phosphonated ionomer based on a pentafluorostyrene,⁴ mitigating the need for electrode post-doping procedures. In this presentation, we report the benefits of using phosphonated ionomers for ion-pair coordinated membrane fuel cells under anhydrous conditions.

References

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2. Li, J.O. Jensen, R.F. Savinell, N.J. Bjerrum, Prog. Polym. Sci., 2009, 34, 449-477.
3. -S. Lee, J.S. Spendelow, Y.K. Choe, C. Fujimoto, Y. S. Kim, Nature Energy, 2016, 1, 16120-16124.
4. Atanasov, A. Oleynikov, J. Xia, S. Lyonnard, J. Kerres, J. Power Sources, 2017, 343, 364-372.