Performance of high-temperature polymer-electrolyte membrane fuel cells (HT-PEMFCs) are less affected by carbon monoxide poisoning in electrode catalyst layers because these operate at high temperatures between 100 and 200 °C when compared with those of low-temperature polymer-electrolyte membrane fuel cells (LT-PEMFCs). Electrode catalyst layers in HT-PEMFCs were manufactured by deposition of catalyst inks on gas-diffusion layers. These catalyst inks include Pt/C, PTFE-binder and solvent for dispersing them. PTFE-binder in catalyst inks affect on binding and catalytic performance of Pt particles. Therefore, control and understand of distribution of PTFE-binder are important to improve cell performance. In this study, full atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulation have been used in order to calculate detailed morphologies at varying contents ranged from 4.0 to 35.1 wt% of PTFE-binder on Pt/C electrodes. The morphologies of low content of PTFE-binder, these shaped triple-phase boundaries (TPBs) when PTFE-binder was dispersed Pt particles and carbon surface. From analysis of Pt-PTFE pair correlation analysis, the coordination number of this pair increased from 0.43 to 1.23 and surface coverage of Pt particles changed 40.0 to 84.0% as increased of content of PTFE-binder from 4.0 to 35.1 wt%. It means that surface of Pt particles was gradually covered by increasing content of PTFE-binder. However, no noteworthy changes were observed when content of PTFE-binder exceeded 20.0 wt%<br/><br/>

Influence of PTFE-binder content on coverage of Pt/C electrode in a high-temperature polymer-electrolyte membrane fuel cells

2019 Spring National Meeting

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