Interactions between reinforced membrane durability and gas diffusion layer and flow field plate designs in fuel cells
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Composite membranes reinforced with expanded polytetrafluorethylene (ePTFE) have been increasingly adopted over conventional non-reinforced membranes in fuel cell applications. In this work, a state-of-the-art ePTFE reinforced membrane is subjected to combined chemical and mechanical degradation until failure to assess and identify failure modes. Sample failure analysis is affected by 4D in-situ imaging with an X-ray computed tomography system, which is a non-invasive 3D visualization technique that can capture membrane morphological changes pertaining to the degradation. Crack development in the catalyst layer and membrane planes, as well as global membrane thinning are the universal failure modes identified in the active area, which are strongly dependent on the interactions between catalyst coated membrane and gas diffusion layer (GDL) and flow field plate. Catalyst layer and membrane cracks are all found under the flow channels, and are highly correlated to natural surface features in the GDL; while locally elevated membrane thinning is observed at locations with higher compression such as the flow field land. Despite the membrane degradation observed, the ePTFE reinforcement layer retains its integrity from both chemical and mechanical degradation, resulting in substantially improved durability. Additional durability benefits are demonstrated with thick microporous layers and wide lands.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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".