Experimental analysis of catalyst degradation in High Temperature PEM Fuel Cells subjected to accelerated ageing tests

The loss in performance during fuel cell operation is one of the critical factors that hamper fuel cells commercialization. This paper presents the University of Trieste Engineering and Architecture department research activity related to High Temperature Polymer Electrode Membrane (HT-PEM) fuel cell degradation. The aim of the research is to correlate catalyst degradation with fuel cell operation mode and performance. For evaluating catalyst degradation, a procedure to analyze the Membrane Electrode Assembly (MEA) with Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS) technique has been developed and presented. Furthermore, accelerated degradation test have been carried out for samples conditioning. Preliminary SAXS analysis results confirm the agglomeration of the Pt particles that leads to a growth in size from 5 nm up to 8 nm for the considered MEAs. Accelerated degradation tests show a fuel cell loss in performance lower than 6% after 100,000 load cycling. First SAXS results of these tests are presented.