Self-Assembly and Transport Limitations in Confined Nafion Films
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ion-conducting polymers are important materials for a variety of electrochemical applications. Perfluorinated ionomers, such as Nafion, are the benchmark materials for proton conduction and are widely used in fuel cells and other electrochemical devices including solar-fuel generators, chlor-alkali cells, and redox flow batteries. While the behavior of Nafion in bulk membranes (10 to 100s μm thick) has been studied extensively, understanding its properties under thin-film confinement is limited. Elucidating the behavior of thin Nafion films is particularly important for the optimization of fuel-cell catalyst layers or vapor-operated solar-fuel generators, where a thin film of ionomer is responsible for the transport of ions to and from the active electrocatalytic centers. Using a combination of transport-property measurements and structural characterization, this work demonstrates that confinement of Nafion in thin films induced thickness-dependent proton conductivity and ionic-domain structure. Confining Nafion films to thicknesses below 50 nm on a silicon substrate results in a loss of microphase separation of the hydrophilic and hydrophobic domains, which drastically increases the material’s water uptake while in turn decreasing its ionic conductivity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".