Abstract
The degradation of cations on the alkaline exchange membranes is the major challenge for alkaline membrane fuel cells. In this paper, we investigated the degradation barriers by density functional theory for substituted benzyltrimethyl ammonium (BTMA+) cations, which is one of the most commonly used cations for alkaline exchange membranes. We found that substituted cations with electron-releasingsubstituent groups at meta-position of the benzyl ring could result in improved degradation barriers. However, after investigating more than thirty substituted BTMA+ cations with ten different substituent groups, the largest improvement of degradation barriers is only 1.6 kcal/mol. This implies that the lifetime of alkaline membrane fuel cells could increase from a few months to a few years byusing substituted BTMA+ cations, an encouraging but still limited improvement for real-world applications.
Original language | American English |
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Number of pages | 11 |
State | Published - 2014 |
Event | 226th Meeting of the Electrochemical Society - Cancun, Mexico Duration: 5 Oct 2014 → 10 Oct 2014 |
Conference
Conference | 226th Meeting of the Electrochemical Society |
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City | Cancun, Mexico |
Period | 5/10/14 → 10/10/14 |
NREL Publication Number
- NREL/CP-2C00-62309
Keywords
- alkaline membrane fuel cells
- benzyl trimethyl ammonium
- degradation barriers