Evaluating the Impact of Cell Assembly and Operating Conditions on the Performance of Anion Exchange Membrane Electrolyzers

The alkaline water electrolyzer (AWE) and proton exchange membrane water electrolyzer (PEMWE) are the two dominant commercial platforms to produce hydrogen through electrolysis. Recent efforts have focused on combining the benefits of the two technologies, leading to the creation of the anion exchange membrane water electrolyzer (AEMWE). AEMWEs operate under high pH conditions, like AWEs, enabling the use of cost-effective materials as cell components and non-noble electrocatalysts. AEMWEs also utilize the same high-performance zero-gap design PEMWEs and also have the ability to operate at high differential pressures. Therefore, AEMWEs offer the opportunity to optimize both cost and performance, out-pacing both incumbent technologies after further development. As the “active” materials in AEMWEs, the anion exchange membranes and ionomers and the catalysts have been widely studied and a number of materials have been proposed and reported on in the literature and throughout the last several ECS meetings. However, such materials are only one piece of the overall puzzle when it comes to the operation of AEMWEs. There are several aspects of cell assembly and operation that go a long way to dictating the performance of an operating cell. Therefore, the overarching goal of this study was to investigate several operational variables for AEMWEs with a known high-quality set of anion-exchange materials, known commercially as Aemion+™ paired with commercially available catalysts – PtNi/C at the cathode and either IrOx or NiFeOx at the anode. For cell assembly, representative variables that were changed were the type of membrane and electrode pre-treatment, gasket thickness, cell torque and membrane thickness. Operationally, temperature, current density and break-in procedure were adjusted. This talk will link each of these variables to the polarization performance and galvanostatic durability