Hydrogen production from aqueous methanol in a proton exchange membrane electrolyser with porous metal flow fields

摘要

In this paper, we present the studies carried out on electrolysis of aqueous methanol for hydrogen production in a proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyser with a novel porous flow field made of sintered metal powder. The obtained results showed that the use of porous flow field has a significant improvement in performance compared to a conventional groove flow field. This could be attributed to an increase in effective electrode area and to a reduction in diffusion polarization by using the porous, material which enables the flow field to supply reactant evenly to the electrodes. Based on this performance improvement, the influence of operating conditions such as cell voltage and methanol concentration on hydrogen production was analyzed.