Advanced Material and Design Approaches for the Catalyst Layer/ Electrode Assembly in Electrochemical Energy Applications

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The “cleantech sector” is expected to be the third largest global industrial sector by 2020 with a global market size of approximately 3 trillion dollars. Canadian revenues are projected to be about 62 billion with a significant increase in direct Canadian employment in this sector. The global community has recognized the importance of moving to cleaner and more sustainable solutions to energy provision and use. A large challenge is to improve electric grid management and energy distribution with energy storage in order to bring on new sources of energy such as renewables, and to get better utilization of energy without curtailment and energy loss. In addition the transportation sector is moving towards electrification with the ultimate goal of zero emission vehicles. Electrochemical systems including batteries, electrolysers, and fuel cells provide the promise of being one of the few comprehensive longer-term solutions to meeting these goals. In particular, hydrogen production / conversion is seen as a key to “power to gas” management up to the terawatt level and hydrogen based transportation (e-mobility) is seen as a solution to mid- to long-range transportation with filling and infrastructure similar to the status-quo. Canada has been one of the world leaders in the development of fuel cell, electrolyser, and hydrogen technologies which are now being used in a number of international commercial and demonstration applications. With respect to electrochemical energy storage and conversion it is important that cost (also related to performance) is further reduced for commercial uptake. The proposed research focuses on reducing the energy losses for the production of hydrogen in Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) electrolysers by using new low cost nano-catalyst layer approaches that are easily manufactured, and implementing new performance enhancement strategies. The research will also focus on the research and development of a new scalable low cost fuel cell with a membrane-less architecture and ultralow catalyst loading that incorporates aspects of the redox flow battery and the PEM fuel cell. The new fuel cell can potentially offer a number of advantages to energy systems particularly with respect to efficiency and fuel flexibility.