medium temperature copper chloride electrolysis

h i g h l i g h t s g r a p h i c a l a b s t r a c t Composite membranes studied for hydrogen production from CuCl membrane electrolytic. Phosphoric acid promoted the proton conductivity by increasing the hydrogen bonding. High purity of H 2 produced from CuCl membrane electrolysis. Polybenzimidazole-zirconium phosphate showed enhanced CuCl electrolytic performance. PBI/ZrP proton conductivity was 3fold higher than pristine PBI.

h i g h l i g h t s g r a p h i c a l a b s t r a c t Composite membranes studied for hydrogen production from CuCl membrane electrolytic. Phosphoric acid promoted the proton conductivity by increasing the hydrogen bonding. High purity of H 2 produced from CuCl membrane electrolysis. Polybenzimidazole-zirconium phosphate showed enhanced CuCl electrolytic performance. PBI/ZrP proton conductivity was 3fold higher than pristine PBI.

A composite membrane of polybenzimidazole (PBI) and sulfonated polyether ether ketone (SPEEK) based electrolyzer that operates at higher working temperature above 80 °C is advantageous for faster electrochemical kinetics, higher current exchange density and more resistance to fuel impurities. A high-temperature copper chloride-based composite membrane electrolysis is proposed to overcome the issue of fuel diffusivity, membrane’s thermal and mechanical stability in hydrogen production. The phosphoric acid (PA) functionalized composite PBI and SPEEK membranes were synthesized by a standard method followed with immersion in 85 wt% phosphoric acid at different temperatures for 80 minutes. The composite membranes have been characterized for water uptake, tensile strength, thermal stability by thermogravimetric (TGA) analysis, permeability by Cu diffusion cell and ionic exchange capacity (IEC). From the result, the PA doped PBI membrane (100 °C, 80 min) shows significant improvement in te...

A CuCl electrolyzer that constitutes of composite polymer
electrolyte membrane (PEM) that functions at medium-temperature
(> 100 ºC)  is beneficial for rapid electrochemical kinetics, and better in
handling fuel pollutants. A synthesized polybenzimidazole (PBI) composite membrane from the addition of ZrO2 followed with phosphoric acid (PA) is suggested to overcome the main issues in CuCl electrolysis, including the copper diffusion and proton conductivity. PBI/ZrP properties improved significantly with enhanced proton conductivity (3 fold of pristine PBI, 50% of Nafion 117), superior thermal stability (> 600 ºC), good mechanical strength (85.17 MPa), reasonable Cu permeability (7.9 x 10-7) and high ionic exchange capacity (3.2 x 10-3 mol⸱g-1). Hydrogen produced at 0.5 A⸱cm-2 (115 ºC) for PBI/ZrP and Nafion 117 was 3.27 cm3⸱min-1 and 1.85 cm3⸱min-1, respectively. The CuCl electrolyzer efficiency was ranging from 91 to 97 %, thus proven that the hybrid PBI/ZrP membrane can be a promising and cheaper alternative to Nafion membrane.