High‐Performance Alkaline Polymer Electrolyte for Fuel Cell Applications

Abstract

Although the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) has made great progress in recent decades, its commercialization has been hindered by a number of factors, among which is the total dependence on Pt‐based catalysts. Alkaline polymer electrolyte fuel cells (APEFCs) have been increasingly recognized as a solution to overcome the dependence on noble metal catalysts. In principle, APEFCs combine the advantages of and alkaline fuel cell (AFC) and a PEMFC: there is no need for noble metal catalysts and they are free of carbonate precipitates that would break the waterproofing in the AFC cathode. However, the performance of most alkaline polyelectrolytes can still not fulfill the requirement of fuel cell operations. In the present work, detailed information about the synthesis and physicochemical properties of the quaternary ammonia polysulfone (QAPS), a high‐performance alkaline polymer electrolyte that has been successfully applied in the authors' previous work to demonstrate an APEFC completely free from noble metal catalysts (S. Lu, J. Pan, A. Huang, L. Zhuang, J. Lu, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2008, 105, 20611), is reported. Monitored by NMR analysis, the synthetic process of QAPS is seen to be simple and efficient. The chemical and thermal stability, as well as the mechanical strength of the synthetic QAPS membrane, are outstanding in comparison to commercial anion‐exchange membranes. The ionic conductivity of QAPS at room temperature is measured to be on the order of 10−2 S cm−1. Such good mechanical and conducting performances can be attributed to the superior microstructure of the polyelectrolyte, which features interconnected ionic channels in tens of nanometers diameter, as revealed by HRTEM observations. The electrochemical behavior at the Pt/QAPS interface reveals the strong alkaline nature of this polyelectrolyte, and the preliminary fuel cell test verifies the feasibility of QAPS for fuel cell applications.