Enhancing Efficiency and Durability of PEM Water Electrolysis with Low Iridium Loading through Nanofiber-Modified Porous Transport Electrodes

Smoltek Hydro­gen has made sig­nif­i­cant strides in achiev­ing low irid­i­um load­ing through our inno­v­a­tive Porous Trans­port Elec­trode (PTE) con­cept. This approach involves mod­i­fy­ing a Porous Trans­port Lay­er (PTL) by grow­ing ver­ti­cal­ly aligned Car­bon Nanofibers (CNFs) using our in-house patent pro­tect­ed tech­nol­o­gy, effi­cient­ly increas­ing sur­face area. Fol­low­ing this mod­i­fi­ca­tion, a pro­tec­tive lay­er of cor­ro­sion-resis­tant and con­duc­tive mate­r­i­al (e.g., Plat­inum) is applied to the CNFs. Sub­se­quent­ly, an OER cat­a­lyst lay­er is deposit­ed uti­liz­ing a three-elec­trode cathod­ic elec­trode­po­si­tion method. The elec­trode­posit­ed Ir cat­a­lyst exhibits strong adhe­sion to the CNF PTEs, result­ing in a high elec­tri­cal conductivity. 

In this work, we suc­cess­ful­ly reduced Ir load­ings to 0.1 mg/​cm2 in the PTE, demon­strat­ing excel­lent mass activ­i­ty in the half-cell tests. In the PEMWE tests, the polar­iza­tion curves of elec­trodes with low Ir load­ing exhib­it­ed supe­ri­or per­for­mance com­pared to cells with sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er Ir loading.