Development of catalyst and gas diffusion layers using nanotechnology for proton exchange membrane fuel cells

Abstract

Nanotechnology in Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFCs), the topic of this thesis, encompasses a large array of subjects. It is important to understand the market demand for fuel cells and then realize the types of changes and improvements of the technology needed to bring it to the marketplace. By integrating nanotechnology into fuel cells, their performances will be greatly increased. Nanotechnology will be able to provide the profound material properties of nanoscaled materials and structures needed to make fuel cells a desired technology. Novel gas diffusion layers (GDLs) and catalyst layers (CLs) have been developed for PEMFCs in this work. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are grown directly and in-situ on carbon papers to develop high performance durable GDLs that can operate at high temperature and low humidity during fuel cell testing. Platinum nanopartic1es are combined with CNTs using a new chemical processing route to develop efficient and lower cost CLs confirmed by fuel cell testing. In addition, platinum nanowires were employed for the development of catalyst layers; however, due to the manufacturing of platinum nanowires and their substrate, necessary to hold them vertically, the fuel cell tests did not show promising results and further work is recommended for future studies to utilize the full potentials of platinum nanowires.