The Effect Of Anode Structure On The Performance Of Passive Direct Methanol Fuel Cells

As the most promising power source for portable electronic devices, direct methanolfuel cell (DMFC) has become a hot topic and drawn many people’s attention. This thesisfocuses on the effect of anode structure on the performance of DMFCs and aims tosuppress methanol crossover, reduce the noble metal loading within MEA, maximize thetriple-phase boundary and decrease the anode carbon corrosion. The researches include thefollowing three aspects:(i) To issue a high energy density of the DMFC, it’s desirable to achieve a stableoperation with neat methanol. Therefore, we provide an integrated anode structure basedon a microporous titanium plate (Ti-IAS). With such a systematical simplification, a stableoperation DMFC with high performance could be realized.(ii) To reduce the noble metal contents in MEA without loss of the performance, wereport a novel anode micro-porous layer (MPL) through polypyrrole nanowire networksin-situ grown on the surface of carbon paper via an electropolymerization technology.When the catalyst loading is decreased to half traditional loading, the performance of thepassive DMFC with the above novel MPL is still comparable with the conventional one.(iii) To enhance the catalyst utilization, maximize the electrochemical reactionboundary and alleviate the anode carbon corrosion, a facile and controllable approach toconstruct a nanostructure-oriented and carbon-free anode structure by introducingvertically oriented polypyrrole nanorods arrays on the microporous titanium plate ispresented.