Školitel: Mgr. Yurii Yakovlev, Ph.D.
Konzultant: Prof. RNDr. Vladimír Matolín, DrSc.
Stav práce: volná
Anotace:
Hydrogen fuel cells are an important source of renewable, emission-free energy and can be considered as one of the keystones of carbon-neutral society. Recent advancements of this technology facilitate a commercialization and today numerous examples can be found elsewhere with ever-increasing market share. This makes crucial a scaling-up process when successful laboratory findings are transferred to the real-world fuel cells considering both enlargement of components and mass production-oriented preparation techniques. Usage of such techniques for catalyst layers preparation as screen, press and offset printing and magnetron sputtering is advantageous due to maturity of the technology, however, adoption of them for high-scale production is not a trivial task. Special requirements for appropriate catalyst ink as viscosity, controllable adhesion to different surfaces, as well as a good transport of gases, protons and electrons in the resulted catalyst layer, render the process of ink formulation extremely challenging. A significant change of ink formulation required to enhance its process-ability performance will alter the interaction of catalyst particles with ionomer phase, pores formulation and phase distribution. Thus, properties as catalyst activity, water management, durability, start-up time can be affected and should be studied. Therefore, high-scale preparation of the catalyst layers demands extensive inter-disciplinary research involving analytic methods as XPS, XRD, EDX, BET; electrochemistry methods as RDE/RRDE; fuel cell testing. Acquired SEM, TEM data on morphological properties of catalyst layers will be connected to the lab and real-world performance, which would provide a complete and novel study, important for the fuel-cell community. As a final step of the work is a production of the proof-of-concept research stack with testing it in real-world conditions.