APPLICATIONS OF TECHNOLOGY:
- Low cost water electrolysis and hydrogen formation.
BENEFITS:
- Reduced cost by high throughput fabrication and lower use of alcohol solvent.
- Minimize ink intrusion to porous substrate during coating process by additive engineering
- Outstanding water electrolysis performance without a platinum group metal catalyst.
BACKGROUND:
The United States Department of Energy’s goals call for gigawatt to terawatt-scale water electrolyzers using renewable energy for green hydrogen. However, widespread adoption demands cost-effective manufacturing for electrolyzer components. Among these components, the porous transport electrode (PTE) plays a critical role in both proton exchange membrane water electrolyzers (PEMWE) and anion exchange membrane water electrolyzers (AEMWE), highlighting the importance of advancements in PTE technology to enable the scaling of hydrogen production to meet the Energy Earth Shots objectives. Current ink recipes have problems which make them unsuitable for high throughput PTE fabrication, leading to catalyst loss and poor electrolyzer performance.
TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW:
Researchers at Berkeley Lab have developed a novel ink recipe with high solid content and reduced alcohol solvent used to manufacture large areas of PTE at high throughput. This method involves the fabrication of PTE with uniformly distributed non-platinum group metal (PGM) catalysts. The ink also contains organic additives that provide the ink with ideal rheological properties prohibiting penetration through the porous transport layer. The PTE shows significant improvement in performance compared to the baseline PTE in AEMWE compared to state-of-the-art PEMWE with PGM catalysts.
Figure 1. Left: PTE fabricated using baseline ink. Right: PTE fabricated using optimized ink developed at LBNL.
DEVELOPMENT STAGE:
Laboratory scale with similar system validation in relevant environment
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS:
Xiong Peng
IP Status: Patent pending
OPPORTUNITIES:
Available for licensing or collaborative research