RE: News next week?31 Jan 2021 18:29
BB2,
"So the solid membranes last around 41+ days at present"
Not necessarily. the data discussed in that August 2020 article is from research published 16 July 2020, so it is already 28 weeks and 4 days old.
Reading the sections below, it looks to me that they already found the solutions to longevity back in July last year. So I would expect the teams working on this to have used the learnings to further improve and test many new versions of the Membrane in that time.
Also, if you look at Figure 8b on the study, you can see that at 1000 hours the membrane was far from dead, so they could have carried on running it for months. 1000 hours was likely just the first target achieved, not the final figure.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17370-7/figures/8
There would be no point spending staff time and our money developing an S Fuel Cell unless they know Alkamem is commercially viable, so this must be a big hint "the ongoing development of our “S” Series fuel cell and Alkamem. Stay tuned for further updates.".
Electrode modification to improve AMFC durability
Therefore, there are two essential parts to be considered in terms of long-term stability tests: 1) suppressing polymer electrolyte degradation by operating at high reacting gas dew points while 2) preventing cell flooding. Considering these two factors, we propose a new GDE design for AMFCs that integrates hydrophobic components into both the catalyst layers and GDLs.
Discussion
One way to assist the cell in balancing the rate of water produced by the cell and the rate of water rejection while maintaining high RH in the reacting gases is to redesign the electrodes, which is done here. Electrode designs that infiltrate the anode and cathode catalyst layers with hydrophobic PTFE are introduced for the first time in AMFCs and the amount of hydrophobic agent in the GDL is also studied. The results are AMFCs with operational stability that is significantly ahead of the current state-of-the-art AMFCs stability. This work shows the promising future of AMFCs for potential commercial applications and also provides knowledge that can be used to design non-PGM catalyst layers, design AMFC stacks and systems, and define operational variables for other research groups.
At OCV under 100% RH, longitudinal sections of both the anode (Fig. 7b) and cathode (Fig. 7c) show very porous catalyst layers, indicating no visually observable flooding or ionomer swelling. Next, the cell was operated at 0.1?V in order to produce liquid water without reducing the dew points, similar to the conditions in Fig. 2. The current density vs. time plot is shown in Supplementary Fig. 8. However, unlike Fig. 2, during operation this electrode did not undergo significant physical changes and it appears that the ionomer swelling and water accumulation were successfully suppressed by integrating hydrophobic components in both CLs and GDLs, which is expected to be critical in achieving stable long-te
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