Grant: Alliance Grants

The development of the at-scale, clean hydrogen economy envisioned by 2050 in the Canadian Hydrogen Strategy requires the development of cheap and environmentally friendly technologies to manufacture hydrogen. Canada is the sixth-largest global producer of electricity in the world with one of the lowest carbon intensity grids; therefore, it is perfectly poised to produce hydrogen via electrolysis using off-peak renewable electricity. Proton exchange membrane water electrolyzers (PEMWEs) are the most energy efficient electrolysis technology, however the broader economic penetration of PEMWEs is mainly prevented by the high cost of the very expensive iridium and perfluorosulfonated membranes. Consequently, advanced membranes, such as hydrocarbon membranes, and improved catalyst layer (CL) structures are crucial to achieve cost targets for PEMWEs, which the U.S. Department of Energy has set at 1 kg of hydrogen per $1 by 2030. The overall objective of this project is to assess the feasibility of reducing the cost of PEMWE by using hydrocarbon-based catalyst coated PEMWEs optimized by computational methods.To develop the proposed PEMWE, the expertise and recent advancements in polymer synthesis and fabrication at Simon Fraser University (SFU), and fabrication, characterization and computational modeling expertise at the University of Alberta (UAlberta), University of Freiburg (UFreiburg) and Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR) will be leveraged. Catalyst coated membranes will be manufactured using novel hydrocarbon ionomers by either the spray coating technology at SFU and UFreiburg or the inkjet printing technology at UAlberta. Membranes will be synthesized and characterized at SFU, catalyst coated membranes will be characterized using advanced computer tomography and electron microscopy at UAlberta and UFreiburg, and tested using the segmented cell hardware at DLR. Graduate students and researchers in the project will share their knowledge and findings by participating in semester long exchanges and attending two international conferences one in Germany and one in Canada where a public workshop will also be organized.