Optimizing interlayer thickness for enhanced performance and chemical durability in sandwich-structured PEM fuel cells
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells are a leading technology for clean energy conversion, but their widespread adoption is hindered by the trade-off between high performance and long-term chemical durability. Here, we report an engineered multilayer PEM that sandwiches a gas barrier interlayer between cast Nafion outer layers. A blend of poly(vinyl alcohol) and poly(vinylsulfonic acid) (PVA/PVS) is used as the interlayer material, designed to suppress gas crossover and mitigate chemical attack without sacrificing ionic conductivity. The optimized membrane (designated PVA-100) has an interlayer loading of 100 μg/cm 2 and achieves power density equivalent to pristine Nafion at 0.6 V. Crucially, under accelerated stress testing, this membrane exhibits 1.8x higher chemical durability compared with a conventional membrane, maintaining superior voltage stability and superior power output retention at 0.6 V. These findings establish interlayer engineering as a scalable and effective strategy to overcome the durability–performance trade-off in PEM fuel cells. • Multilayer PEMs designed with a PVA/PVS gas barrier interlayer. • Effect of interlayer thickness on PEFC performance is systematically studied. • Optimized interlayers do not negatively impact initial cell performance. • Significantly improved durability compared to equivalent Nafion membranes. • More stable rated power output than Nafion during the durability test.
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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".