Influence of Operating Conditions and Material Properties on the Mass Transport Losses of Polymer Electrolyte Water Electrolysis

Three different porous transport layer (PTL) structures, based on titanium sintered powders, were characterized using X-ray tomographic microscopy to determine key geometric properties such as porosity, pore and particle size distributions as well as effective transport properties. The mass transport through the PTL contributes to the voltage losses in the polymer electrolyte water electrolysis cell. Therefore, influence of the PTL structure on the mass transport overpotential is investigated as function of current densities (<= 4 A center dot cm(-2)), operating pressures (1-100 bar) and temperatures (40-60 degrees C), respectively. A decrease of transport losses was observed with increasing pressure and temperature for all investigated PTLs. At around 100 bar balanced pressure, the transport losses for all PTLs converge to about 40 mV per applied A center dot cm(-2) , suggesting that other parts of the cell such as the catalyst layer or their interface contribute to these remaining losses. The performance loss, induced by the different PTL structures, shows a stronger correlation with geometric parameters such as pore and particle size distributions than transport properties like effective diffusivity and permeability. The finest materials with d(50) pore and particle diameters of 40-48 and 68 mu m, respectively, are performing better than the coarsest material with diameters roughly twice the sizes. (C) The Author(s) 2017. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. All rights reserved.