High performance radiation-grafted membranes and electrodes for polymer electrolyte fuel cells
- IMRA Materials R&D Co., Ltd., Aichi (Japan)
Polymer electrolyte fuel cells (PEFC) have attracted much attention for stationary and electric vehicle applications. Much progress has been made to improve their performance recently. However there are still several problems to overcome for commercialization. Among them, the cost of polymer electrolyte membranes seems to be rather critical, because a cost estimate of a practical fuel cell stack shows that the membrane cost must be reduced at least by two orders of magnitude based on current perfluorosulfonic acid membranes eg. Nafion{reg_sign}. Thus the development of new membrane materials is strongly desired. Styrene grafted tetrafluoroethylene-hexafluoropropylene copolymer (FEP) membranes have been studied for a fuel cell application by G. Scherer et al. These authors showed that membranes obtained by radiation grafting served as an alternative membrane for fuel cells although there were several problems to overcome in the future. These problems include shorter life time which was concluded to result from the decomposition of grafted polystyrene side chains. We report here the performance of our fuel cells which were fabricated from our radiation grafted membranes (IMRA MEMBRANE) and gas diffusion electrodes.
- Research Organization:
- Fuel Cell Seminar Organizing Committee (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 460307
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-961107-Absts.; ON: TI97001494; TRN: 97:001723-0160
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Fuel cell seminar, Kissimmee, FL (United States), 17-20 Nov 1996; Other Information: PBD: [1996]; Related Information: Is Part Of Fuel cells seminar; PB: 794 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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