Simultaneous improvement of power density and durability of sulfonated poly(ether ether ketone) membrane by embedding <scp> CeO <sub>2</sub> ‐ATiO <sub>2</sub> </scp> : A comprehensive study in low humidity proton exchange membrane fuel cells
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Herein, we describe the incorporation of cerium oxide-coated amine-functionalized titania nanorods (CeO2-ATiO2) as a bifunctional nanofiller in sulfonated poly(ether ether ketone) (SPEEK) as a cost-effective and high-performance proton exchange membrane (PEM) for PEM fuel cells (PEMFCs). Facile and effective functionalization of TiO2 was performed using amine-containing organic moieties, followed by coating the ATiO2 nanorods with CeO2. A simple solution casting method was employed to incorporate CeO2-ATiO2 into the SPEEK matrix with various weight ratio of 0.5%, 1%, 2%, 4%, or 6%. The successful incorporation of prepared nanofiller in the SPEEK membrane matrix was confirmed by structural and morphological studies such as Fourier transform infrared, X-ray diffractometer, scanning electron microscopy, and atomic force microscope of the SPEEK/CeO2-ATiO2 composite membranes. The presence of ATiO2 improved proton conductivity while CeO2 alleviated the chemical degradation of the membrane by scavenging free radicals. The proton conductivity of an SPEEK/CeO2-ATiO2 (2 wt%) nanocomposite membrane at 60°C under 20% relative humidity (RH) was 17.06 mS cm−1 whereas that of a bare SPEEK membrane under the same conditions was only 4.53 mS cm−1. PEMFCs containing SPEEK/CeO2-ATiO2 (2 wt%) nanocomposite membrane attained a maximum power density of 117 mW cm−2 at a load current density of 371 mA/cm2 at 60°C under 100% RH. In contrast, a PEMFC containing the bare SPEEK membrane delivered a power density of 91 mW cm−2 at a load current of 253 mA cm−2. A single cell open circuit voltage (OCV) test to examine the durability of membranes revealed that a PEMFC with an SPEEK/CeO2-ATiO2 (2 wt%) membrane showed excellent stability with an OCV decay of 0.925 mV h−1 at 60°C under 30% RH, whereas that of a PEMFC with a bare SPEEK membrane was 3.437 mV h−1 under identical conditions. Based on the abovementioned results, it is found that the SPEEK/CeO2-ATiO2 nanocomposite membranes overcome the durability issues of pristine SPEEK membranes and show enhanced electrochemical performance under a harsh PEMFC environment. Highlights CeO2-ATiO2 was utilized as a bifunctional filler to fabricate composite membrane. Integration of CeO2-ATiO2 improved the proton conductivity of sulfonated poly(ether ether ketone) (SPEEK) under low relative humidity. Addition of CeO2-ATiO2 to SPEEK resulted in improved physiochemical and thermomechanical properties. Optimized SPEEK/CeO2-ATiO2 (2 wt%) exhibited improved proton exchange membrane fuel cell performance while retaining excellent durability compared to pristine SPEEK.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".