Deconvolution of Charge-Transfer, Mass Transfer, and Ohmic Resistances of Phosphonic Acid-Sulfonic Acid Ionomer Binders in Electrochemical Hydrogen Pumps
Authors: Arunagiri Karthik , Wong Andrew Jark-Wah , Briceno-Mena Luis A , Janik Michael John , Romagnoli Jose A , Arges Christopher G. 
Published: February 2024

Ion-pair high-temperature polymer electrolyte membranes (HT-PEMs) paired with phosphonic acid ionomer electrode binders have substantially improved the performance of HT-PEM electrochemical hydrogen pumps (EHPs)1, 2 and fuel cells3. Recently, blending poly(pentafluorstyrene-co-tetrafluorostyrene phosphonic acid) (PTFSPA) with NafionTM improved ionomer conductivity under anhydrous conditions in the temperature range of 100 °C to 250 °C. Using the said polymer blend as an electrode binder resulted in a 2 W.cm-2 peak power density of fuel cells4 at 240 °C (a HT-PEM fuel cell record). However, much is still unknown about how phosphonic acid ionomers blended with perfluorosulfonic acid (PFSA) materials affect electrode kinetics and gas transport in porous electrodes. In this work, we studied the ionic conductivity, electrode kinetics, and gas transport resistance of 3 types of phosphonic acid ionomers, poly(vinyl phosphonic acid), poly(vinyl benzyl phosphonic acid) by themselves and when blended with Aquivion®. These studies were performed in the context of an EHP platform – both membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) and interdigitated electrode arrays (IDAs) decorated with nanoscale platinum electrocatalysts with thin film ionomer electrolytes. For all phosphoric acid ionomer types, the addition of Aquivion® promoted ionic conductivity, hydrogen oxidation/evolution reaction kinetics (HOR/HER), and hydrogen gas permeability. Solid-state 31P NMR revealed that the addition of Aquivion® significantly reduced phosphate ester formation in phosphoric acid ionomers and this played a vital role in enhancing ionomer blend conductivity. Using the best blend variant, PTFSPA-Aquivion®, a remarkable EHP performance of 5.1 A.cm-2 at 0.4 V at T = 200 °C was attained. Density functional theory (DFT) simulations identified that phosphonic acids with electron-withdrawing moieties reduced the propensity of the phosphonic acid to adsorb to platinum electrocatalyst surfaces. All phosphonic acid ionomers are anticipated to have a greater affinity for adsorption on platinum when compared to sulphonic acid ionomers (PFSAs). The relative adsorption affiliation of the various phosphoric acid ionomers from DFT is consistent with an explanation that stronger anion-specific adsorption has a detrimental impact and is commensurate with experimentally obtained MEA charge-transfer kinetics. A machine learning-aided compositional model5 revealed that the addition of Aquivion® reduced activation and concentration overpotentials in EHP MEAs and improved exchange current density and diffusivity in EHP IDAs. Future work involves employing the EHPs in a real-world application for separating and compressing hydrogen from the natural gas mixture.

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Figure 1