In recent years, more attention has been focused on the creation of effective approaches for producing energy sources to attain better human lives. Energy needs have been met by the exploitation of fossil fuels, which are still the world's most powerful energy source. Too much use of fossil fuels has resulted in deforestation and other global warming problems. To address these obstacles, comprehensive research has been conducted to develop alternative energy for fossil fuels, which is crucial factor due to the increasing population, industrial technology development, and raising of energy demand. For this purpose, the fuel cell is a better alternative that can produce electric energy through a one-stage energy conversion process. Also among the electrolytic cells, Polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) electrolytic cells are promising technology for future hydrogen production through water electrolysis technology. Generally, the performance of PEM cells is determined by the reaction rate at the electrode catalysts, the movement of protons through the electrolyte membrane, and the transfer rate of matter. Besides, the membrane electrode assembly (MEA) is a key component in the PEM cell that can increase energy efficiency and electrochemical reaction performance. Extensive research efforts have been taken to enhance the performance of MEA through the development of various electrode and catalytic materials. Coating of catalyst materials on the electrode surface is the widely used technique to prepare a membrane electrode assembly in which the catalyst layer is formed on a microporous layer of the gas diffusion electrode (GDE). In electrolyzer cells, micro-sized holes were made on the surface of the GDE using laser plasma, thus improved the electrochemical reactivity of carbon electrodes of electrolyzer cell. The MoS2&nbsp;catalysts were coated on the surface of GDE and the effect of the electrode under the activation of electrochemical reaction processes were investigated. The electrochemical reduction characteristics of catalysts were analyzed by 3-electrode cell experiments and the correlation between the dimple density of electrode and the electrochemical reaction was also confirmed. The analysis shows that the micromachined electrodes increase the size of the natural pore up to approximately 10 times and facilitate penetration of MoS2&nbsp;catalyst into the electrodes. The micromachined electrodes exhibit a higher dimple density of threshold value with enhanced electrochemical reactions which are superior performance than conventional electrodes. Also, membrane electrode assembly has greatly increased the current density and it was manufactured by the hot-pressing method under low-pressure conditions followed by a micro-machining process. This study opens up the route for improving the performance of MEA in many potential applications such as water electrolysis and fuel cells.

Improved Reactivity Through Micro-Treatment on the Surface of the Carbon Electrode

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.