Preparation and performance of a Nafion®/montmorillonite nanocomposite membrane for direct methanol fuel cell

Direct methanol fuel cells (DMFC) have major technical problems, e.g. slow methanol oxidation kinetics and high methanol crossover, to use as power sources for several applications. To overcome these problems it has been proposed to increase the fuel cell operating temperature to over 100–150 °C and to reduce the methanol permeability. In this work, we made Nafion®/montmorillonite (MMT) nanocomposite membranes and carried out diverse tests. The nanocomposite membranes were produced by direct melt intercalation of perfluorosulfonylfluoride copolymer resin (Nafion® resin) into the montmorillonite and modified montmorillonite (m-MMT) which was organized by dodecylamine. The membrane–electrode assembly (MEA) has been made using a hot pressing method and the electrode prepared using PtRu black and Pt black catalysts for anode and cathode, respectively. The morphology of the nanocomposite membranes has been investigated using SEM and TEM. The nanocomposite membranes and MMT and m-MMT were analyzed using by FT-IR and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The thermal and mechanical properties of those membranes were also investigated and the methanol permeability was measured by gas chromatography (GC). The performance of the MEA using the nanocomposite membrane was evaluated by single cell test. The results show that the performance of the MEA using the nanocomposite membrane was higher than that of a commercial Nafion® membrane at high operating temperature.