While the world is still assessing the impact of the UN-sponsored World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johanesburg in August of 2002, the world action of cutting down on fossil-fuel use by developing more clean energy remains steadfast. President Bush of the United States addressed in his State of Union in January of 2003 that a budget of US$15 billions will be allocated for the development of clean hydrogen fuel cells. In theory and research, the potential of fuel cells to provide for clean energy is highly promising. However, in technical aspect there exist several problems yet to be resolved. Among them, the efficiency, durability, and high cost of electrode materials for fuel cells remain to be improved.
In this paper we present some promising results in which nano-dispersion of catalytic particles are secured on a porous substrate with conductive polymer network. With such electrodes the catalytic particles can achieve a maximum surface area in both particle size reduction and three-dimensional distribution.
Another concern for fuel cell electrodes is the corrosion resistance of both catalytic particles and substrate materials. We employed Amorphous Nano-Crystalline (ANC) materials as the catalytic particles and alumna honeycomb structure with nano-size holes as the substrate in one of our tests. The ANC alloys containing multiple metals including catalytic platinum of 5 to 10 atomic% were obtained by a melt spinning technique. The platinum particles can be manipulated to nano-crystalline sizes by a proper thermal treatment followed by etching the amorphous matrix. The alumna substrate was prepared from anodic treatment of a pure aluminum sheet.
We prepared several kinds of electrode materials with different kinds of dispersion techniques, and then tested them with a half-cell electrochemical device of our own design under various test conditions. Some results are outstandingly high in output and stable in reproducibility.
