High Performance Fuel Cell with Micro Hole Pattern Polymer Electrolyte Membrane through the Air Plasma Etching

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Interface engineering based on the design and fabrication of micro-/nano-structures has received much attention as an effective way to improve the performance of polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells while using the same materials and quantity. Herein, we fabricated spatially hole-array patterned PEMs with different hole-depths by using both plasma etching process and micro-hole pattern polymer stencil inspired by nature. This approach exhibited high pattern-fidelity over large-area and controllability in pattern-depth while excluding the problems of contact-based conventional patterning processes. All the membrane electrode assembly (MEA) with the patterned PEMs with an etch depth of 4 μm (PE4-MEA), 8 μm (PE8-MEA), and 12 μm (PE12-MEA) showed higher performance than the reference MEA with pristine PEM. Among the modified MEAs, the PE8-MEA showed the highest performance enhancement due to the locally thinning effect of the PEM, geometrically favorable features for mass transport, and increased interfacial contact area between the PEM and the catalyst layer.