Quantum-beam technology: A versatile tool for developing polymer electrolyte fuel-cell membranes

Possible presence of hydrophilic SO3H nanoclusters on the surface of dry ultrathin Nafion® films: a positron annihilation study

“…Until recently, a possible interaction between metal surfaces and sulfonate groups has been largely overlooked, in part because of the generally accepted view that Nafion s is a non-adsorbing electrolyte. 8 While many previous studies have focused on the structure/property of various forms of Nafion s membranes with thicknesses ranging from 20 to 200 mm, [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] the properties of thin Nafion s films (o1 mm) are relatively unexplored. It is wellestablished that physical properties of thin polymer films are significantly altered from their bulk analogs.…”

Development of Ion-Exchange Membranes for the Membrane Bunsen Reaction in Thermochemical Hydrogen Production by Iodine-Sulfur Process

“…Cation-exchange membranes were prepared by radiationinduced grafting of styrene (Wako Pure Chemical Industries, Ltd.), and divinylbenzene (DVB, 55%, Wako Pure Chemical Industries, Ltd.) into poly(ethylene-co-tetrafluoroethylene) (ETFE) films (Asahi Glass Co.), followed by sulfonation (Yamaki, 2010). ETFE films with a thickness of 50 µm were used as the base fluoropolymer.…”

“…A grafting method (Hattori et al, 2001;Fang et al, 2016) that introduces polymer chains into a porous substrate is one important method to obtain ion-exchange membranes. We have been developing ion-exchange membranes by using a radiation graft polymerization method (Sawada et al, 2006;Yamaki, 2010), and water permeability through the developed membranes can be controlled by crosslinking the grafted chains (Yamaki et al, 2004;Chen et al, 2006;Sawada et al, 2008). In this paper, ion-exchange membranes for the membrane Bunsen reaction were prepared by using the radiation graft polymerization method.…”

Challenges and opportunities in modelling of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC)

“…The results clearly demonstrated the importance of local liquid transport at pore scale, which could substantially impact the PEMFC performance at cell scale. Over the past decade, the molecular dynamics and quantum mechanics methods have been well developed and widely used for PEMFC to investigate the transfer behaviour at microscopic level …”

“…Over the past decade, the molecular dynamics and quantum mechanics methods have been well developed and widely used for PEMFC to investigate the transfer behaviour at microscopic level. [9][10][11][12][13] However, there are quite a few issues for these modelling methods: (1) The small time step of the simulation results in the low computation efficiency; (2) these numerical methods are mainly used to capture the transfer behaviour of the existing water and droplet, and the combination of multiphase phase flow, chemical reaction, and phase change is currently considered to be a main direction for modelling the water transport behaviour in PEMFC; (3) the ice formation process and morphology in the porous medium, especially in the GDL, MPL, and CL, also remains to be an important issue to be further investigated. In a word, the combination of the multi-scale methods will be the future trend for the modelling research of PEMFC.…”