Polymer Design Strategies for Alkaline Membrane Water Electrolysis

Water electrolysis is a carbon-free hydrogen production technology, making it a promising candidate to mitigate aggravating climate change. Ion exchange membranes are an essential component of membrane-based water electrolysis, enabling high hydrogen production efficiency through a zero-gap configuration. The recent research efforts to develop anion exchange membranes and electrode ionomers have made significant improvement in durability of alkaline membrane water electrolyzers without sacrificing performance and efficiency. Still, there are several factors related to polymer electrolytes that contribute to the voltage loss for water splitting in the alkaline condition including electrode local pH, the interface between membrane and electrodes, and electrochemical oxidation of ionomers at high potentials. This presentation will provide the state-of-the-art performance of alkaline membrane water electrolyzers with respect to the structure of anion exchange membranes and ionomers. The material design strategies and future directions to develop advanced polymer electrolytes will be discussed for this green hydrogen production technology. Reference: Park, E.J., Arges, C.G., Xu, H., Kim, Y.S. ACS Energy Lett. 2022 , 7, 10, 3447–3457 Motz, A.R., Li, D., Keane, A., Manriquez, L.D., Park, E.J., Maurya, S., Chung, H., Fujimoto, C., Jeon, J., Pagels, M.K., Bae, C., Ayers, K.E., Kim, Y.S. Mater. Chem. A 2021 , 9 , 22670-22683 Matanovic, I., Kim, Y.S. Current Opinion in Electrochemistry 2023 , 38 , 101218 Leonard, D.P., Lehmann, M., Klein, J.M., Matanovic, I., Fujimoto, C., Saito, T., Kim, Y.S. Advanced Energy Materials 2023 , 13 , 2203488