Development of a Novel Niobium-based Porous Transport Layer for Proton Exchange Membrane Water Electrolyser Applications

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Proton exchange membrane (PEM) water electrolyser is considered as the most promising technique to produce highly pure hydrogen from renewable energy sources and has reached the early stages of commercial deployment, the remaining challenges include the need to lower the production cost and to increase the cell durability. Porous transport layer (PTL) plays an important role in cell performance and durability. In general, Titanium based material is applied as PTL in the anode side of PEM water electrolyser. However, titanium easily forms a thin layer of oxide on the surface and it will reduce the electrical conductivity. Therefore, PTLs are coated with high amounts of precious metals to ensure proper performance for long-term operation which is the high capital expense of PEM water electrolyser. To overcome this challenge, low-cost coating with high durability should be developed to accelerate the mass production of this technology. In this project, precious metals will be replaced with niobium-based materials and different treatment and doping will be investigated to select the best coating with superior properties. This project is well aligned with Quebec and Canada hydrogen strategy and will create jobs and new knowledge in hydrogen field. It is expected upon the successful completion of the proposed research project, further scale up of the down-selected research results will be carried out for scaled up samples.