Structural optimization study on porous transport layers of sintered titanium for polymer electrolyte membrane electrolyzers

An effective way to improve the performance of polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) electrolyzers is to optimize the structural design of porous transport layers. This paper uses mirco-computed tomography (μ-CT) to study the three-dimensional microstructure distribution characteristics of commercial sintered titanium powder-based porous transport layers (PTL). A three-dimensional PTLs model with different porosity, pore diameter and thickness was established by Stochastic reconstruction model method. In addition, lattice Boltzmann method is used to study the influence of PTL structural parameters and single-phase permeability. The results show that the large compression thickness not only can significantly improve the PTL single-phase permeability, but also has little effect on the interface contact area. In addition, an increase in pore size and porosity will increase the transport performance while reducing interface contact. It is recommended that the average pore size of PTL should be greater than 10 μm, and the porosity should be greater than 30%. This work can be used to guide the preparation technology of PTL in order to improve the performance of PEM electrolyzer.