Pathways Toward Efficient and Durable Anion Exchange Membrane Water Electrolyzers Enabled By Electro-Active Porous Transport Layers

Green hydrogen, produced via water electrolysis using renewable electricity, will play a crucial role in decarbonizing industrial and heavy-duty transportation sectors. Anion exchange membrane water electrolyzers (AEMWEs) can overcome many of the performance and cost limitations of incumbent technologies, however, still suffer from durability challenges due to oxidative instability of anion-exchange ionomers. Herein, the use of an electro-active porous transport layer as anode (PTL-electrode) is demonstrated to enable efficient and durable AEMWEs. The stainless-steel PTL-electrodes are shown to have superior performance and durability compared to traditional catalyst layers containing ionomer and nanoparticle catalysts. An AEMWE cell operating at 2 A cm-2 for over 600 h exhibited a degradation rate of just 5 mu V h-1. During operation, the surface composition of the stainless steel transforms into a mixture of iron and nickel oxyhydroxides, contributing to enhanced oxygen-evolution reaction activity. The combination of experimental work and modeling elucidates how the bulk structure of the PTL-electrode offers an additional design dimension to further improve electrolyzer performance. Lastly, a surface modification strategy is applied to a PTL-electrode to achieve an even higher performing AEMWE (2.3 vs 2.0 A cm-2 at 1.8 V). Overall, this work lays out pathways toward more efficient, durable, and affordable AEMWEs. This work combines experimental design and numerical simulation to present a promising pathway toward accelerating the deployment of anion-exchange-membrane water electrolyzers as more efficient, affordable, and reliable green hydrogen production infrastructures.image