Investigation on the sulfonated poly(ether ether ketone)/poly(amide‐imide)/barium cerate‐based nanocomposite membrane for proton exchange membrane fuel cells

Abstract

The fluorinated Nafion is replaceable by the non-fluorinated clean sulfonated poly (ether ether ketone) for hydrogen-based fuel cell. The acid-base blending of PAI to clean sulfonated poly ether ether ketone (SPEEK) increased the thermal, mechanical, and oxidative properties and decreased the conductivity. It interpreted that higher stability properties appeared on the blended membrane. The loading of BaCeO3 nanoparticles in the SPEEK/poly (amide-imide) (PAI) matrices was done via solution casting process. This outcome provides improved conductivity, ion-exchange property, water uptake (WU) with controlled stability due to the good interfacial interplay among nanoparticles and polymer. The high conductivity (14.98 × 10−3 S cm−1 at 80°C) was reached by SPEEK/PAI /BaCeO3 (90/10/06 wt%) membrane (B3) measured in the electrochemical four-probe impedance spectroscopy. Its current density and power density values are 269 mA cm−2 and 66 mW cm−2, respectively. The voltage retention of the B3 membrane was maintained almost at 0.92 V and degradation of voltage after 20 hours in the durability study was about 0.01 V.