Development of New Fast Proton Conducting Chalcogenide Glassy Electrolytes

摘要

A new research project was initiated to investigate whether high proton conductivity chalcogenide glasses could be prepared by doping base chalcogenide glasses, like glass B2S3 with a proton source, like H2S to yield proton conducting membranes for use in intermediate temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cells. While it will be shown below that indeed proton doped chalcogenide glasses could be prepared over wide ranges of compositions from a number of different base chalcogenide glasses, including B2S3, the proton conductivity for all of these glasses and in some cases polycrystals, was always quite low, rarely exceeding 10-5 (S/cm) at 100 deg C. In addition, the proton doped glasses and ceramics exhibited limited thermal stability such that these materials thermally decomposed rapidly losing H2S, the proton source, above 100 deg C and for this reason had very limited usefulness above 100 deg C.