Performance Investigation of Membrane Electrode Assemblies for Hydrogen Production by Solid Polymer Electrolyte Water Electrolysis

摘要

The development of solid polymer electrolyte (SPE) water electrolysis requires satisfactory membraneelectrode assemblies (MEAs). In this work, different types of SPE membranes and catalysts wereinvestigated to prepare high performance MEAs via a catalyst sprayed membrane under irradiation(CSMUI) method. The water electrolysis performance and properties of the prepared MEAs wereevaluated and analyzed by polarization curve, electrochemistry impedance spectroscopy (EIS) andscanning electron microscopy (SEM). The results showed that SPE type must be chosen carefullyaccording to the specific water electrolysis system, and Pt/C catalyst with low Pt content is lesso suitable as cathode catalyst in water electrolysis. At a cell temperature of 80 C and atmospherepressure, the best performance was obtained by using 60 wt.% Pt/C and Nafion 212 membrane: the-2 -2 cell voltage can be as low as 1.526 V at 1 A cm and the terminal voltage is only 1.63 V at 2 A cm ,and the performance had no obvious degradation after a primary 24 h stability test. SEMcharacterization revealed that the intimate contact between the catalyst layers (CLs) and themembranes, and the uniformly porous CL structure correlate positively with the MEAs prepared byCSMUI method, exhibiting high performances and good stabilities for SPE water electrolysis.