Wettability of Nafion and Nafion/Vulcan Carbon Composite Films
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The wettability of the Pt/carbon/Nafion catalyst layer in proton exchange membrane fuel cells is critical to their performance and durability, especially the cathode, as water is needed for the transport of protons to the active sites and is also involved in deleterious Pt nanoparticle dissolution and carbon corrosion. Therefore, the focus of this work has been on the first-time use of the water droplet impacting method to determine the wettability of 100% Nafion films, as a benchmark, and then of Vulcan carbon (VC)/Nafion composite films, both deposited by spin-coating in the Pt-free state. Pure Nafion films, shown by SEM analysis to have a nanochanneled structure, are initially hydrophobic but become hydrophilic as the water droplet spreads, likely due to reorientation of the sulfonic acid groups toward water. The wettability of VC/Nafion composite films depends significantly on the VC/Nafion mass ratios, even though Nafion is believed to be preferentially oriented (sulfonate groups toward VC) in all cases. At low VC contents, a significant water droplet contact angle hysteresis is seen, similar to pure Nafion films, while at higher VC contents (>30%), the films become hydrophobic, also exhibiting superhydrophobicity, with surface roughness playing a significant role. At >80% VC, the surfaces become wettable again as there is insufficient Nafion loading present to fully cover the carbon surface, allowing the calculation of the Nafion:carbon ratio required for a full coverage of carbon by Nafion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".