Thermo-Chemically Durable Perfluorinated Anion-Conducting Ionomer Membranes for Advanced Alkaline Water Electrolysis

The state-of-the-art membrane for alkaline water electrolysis is porous Zirfon ® . Unfortunately, Zirfon ® has been suffering from the crossover of hydrogen gas permeated through the pores, inducing safety issues including explosion. To date, there have been approaches to solve this problem. One good example is to use anion-conducting ionomer membranes with dense structures. Generally, the membranes, which are made up of hydrocarbon matrices, experience severe degradation, when they are exposed under strong basic conditions at the temperatures higher than 50 o C for high electrochemical performances. In this study, perfluorinated ionomer membranes with extremely high thermo-chemical resistances are developed via the combination of architectural design and supercritical dispersion. References [1] Zirfon perl separator for alkaline water electrolysis, AGFA, April (2016) [2] C. Y Ahn, J, Ahn, S. Y. Kang, O. H. Kim, D. W. Lee, J. H. Lee, J. G. Shim, C. H. Lee, Y. H. Cho, Y. E. Sung, Sci Adv 6 , 1-9 (2020) Keywords : Alkaline water electrolysis, Perfluorinated ionomers, Anion conductivity, Thermo-chemical stability, Membrane