Effect of Microstructure of Porous Transport Layer on Performance in Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Water Electrolyser

Jude O Majasan, Francesco Iacoviello, Paul R Shearing, Dan JL Brett - Electrochemical Innovation Lab, Department of Chemical Engineering, University College London, London, UK

The porous transport layer (PTL) is a vital component of the polymer electrolyte membrane water electrolyser (PEMWE) as it is both a conduit for current distribution and mass transport. This study aims to examine the influence of the microstructure of the PTL on the performance of a PEMWE by the combination of ex-situ and in-situ techniques. Two PTLs with distinctly different mean pore diameter were characterized to determine key properties such as surface morphology, porosity, pore size distribution and porosity distribution. (…) Electrochemical characterization (steady-state polarization electrochemical impedance spectroscopy) results show that the SP-PTL performed better over the current density range tested.

How Amira-Avizo Software is used

Segmentation of the solid and pore phase, image processing and 3D volume rendering of the resulting reconstructed volumes was performed using the Avizo software package (version 9.2.). The solid phase was segmented based on its higher grey-scale value and saved as a binary TIFF file, and the pore phase was separated from the solid phase using non-local means filtration and threshold segmentation. 3D reconstructed images of each sample were generated and segmented 3D TIFF image files were processed for quantification and characterisation.