Development of high performance solid polymer electrolyte water electrolyzer in WE-NET

Fuji Electric Corporate Research and Development, Ltd. has been developing technologies for high performance solid polymer electrolyte water electrolyzers. In term of technical features, Fuji Electric´s technological approach call for membrane-electrode assemblies to be formed by a hot-press method. In the development activities, diverse types of current collectors were test-produced by changing coating materials and methods and various types of 50 cm² membrane-electrode assemblies were fabricated by changing anode catalyst species, membrane species and catalyst loading amount. Based on the results of the performance evaluations of those samples, the authors have obtained a test-produced high performance electrolyzer with platinum-plated titanium fiber plate, gold-plated stainless steel fiber plate and a membrane-electrode assembly composed of iridium dioxide, platinum black and perfluorocarbon sulfonic acid membrane, which registered 1.53 V of cell voltage and 99.2% of current efficiency and 95.8% of energy efficiency for a current density of 1A/cm² at a temperature of 80°C, under atmospheric pressure