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

预计到2020年，“清洁技术部门”将成为全球第三大工业部门，全球市场规模约为3万亿美元。加拿大的收入预计约为620亿美元，加拿大在这一部门的直接就业人数将大幅增加。国际社会已经认识到转向更清洁和更可持续的能源供应和使用解决办法的重要性。一个巨大的挑战是通过储能来改善电网管理和能量分配，以便引入新的能源，如可再生能源，并在不减少和不损失能源的情况下更好地利用能源。此外，运输部门正在走向电气化，最终目标是零排放车辆。包括电池、电解液和燃料电池在内的电化学系统有望成为实现这些目标的为数不多的综合性长期解决方案之一。特别是，氢气生产/转化被视为高达太瓦级的“电改气”管理的关键，基于氢气的运输(电子机动性)被视为具有类似现状的加油和基础设施的中长途运输的解决方案。加拿大在燃料电池、电解槽和氢气技术的开发方面一直处于世界领先地位，这些技术现在正被用于许多国际商业和示范应用。关于电化学能量存储和转换，重要的是进一步降低成本(也与性能有关)，以便于商业应用。建议的研究重点是通过使用新的低成本、易于制造的纳米催化层方法来降低聚合物电解质膜(PEM)电解槽中制氢的能量损失，并实施新的性能改进策略。该研究还将专注于研究和开发一种新的可扩展的低成本燃料电池，该电池具有无膜架构和超低催化剂负载，结合了氧化还原液流电池和PEM燃料电池的各个方面。新的燃料电池可能会为能源系统提供许多优势，特别是在效率和燃料灵活性方面。

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.