CX-100908 Enabling Efficient Water Splitting with Advanced Materials Designed for High pH Membrane Interface

Enabling Efficient Water Splitting with Advanced Materials Designed for High pH Membrane Interface
Award Number: DE-EE0008082
CX(s) Applied: A9, B3.6, B3.15
Fuel Cells Technologies Office
Location(s): MA
Office(s): Golden Field Office

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is proposing to provide federal funding to Northeastern University (NEU) to create durable, high-performance materials and interfaces for advanced water splitting to enable a pathway for reducing costs for hydrogen production using anion exchange membrane (AEM)-based electrolysis.

The project would improve fundamental understanding of how both hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions occur and would lead to novel platinum group metal-free catalyst materials. The project would also involve development of improvements in membranes, ionomers, and gas-evolution electrodes. NEU (Boston, MA) would focus on catalyst development and characterization. University of Delaware (Newark, DE) would synthesize and characterize polymer construction and evaluate gas-evolving electrodes. Activities at Advent Technologies (Boston, MA) include construction and evaluation of gas evolving electrodes. Collaboration is proposed to occur with the HydroGEN Energy Materials Network (EMN) National Laboratory consortium including efforts related to multiscale modeling and computation, model simulations of the membrane catalyst interface and use of advanced ionomers, durability protocols and validation of electrolyzer materials.