The promotion of polyphenol moiety for high-performance antioxidant proton exchange membrane on fuel cells

Radical degradation as one of the most serious issues can sacrifice the performance of proton exchange membrane fuel cells, causing the pinholes and cracks on the surface of PEM and meanwhile shortening the lifetime. The development of appropriate material with reasonable radical scavenging capacity is of great importance. Herein, the bi-functionalized polymer material P-OH-SO₃H as free radical scavenger was synthesized via radical polymerization of PSVE and 4- vinylphenyl acetate, and followed by the process of hydrolysis and protonation. With a dose of 1 wt% free radical scavenger, 3M&P-OH-SO₃H (1wt%) PEM increased the brilliant physical properties of water uptake to 85.0%, tensile strength up to 15.8 Mpa after Fenton test an ion conductivity to 0.324 S/cm at 100% RH. Most importantly, 3M&P-OH-SO₃H (1wt%) PEM also exhibited excellent chemical performance, which implemented an antioxidant efficiency up to 2 times than 3M homogeneous membrane in the first 2 hours (1.64% vs 0.76%) under an accelerated degradation test.