In the past decades, the study of nanotechnology has brought in tremendous progress to the development of polymer electrolyte fuel cells (PEFC) and many advanced catalyst approaches have been developed. However, many of these still remain at ‘test-tube’ level and have not been implemented in practical fuel cells. The concerns about the gap between the pure material research and fuel cells are increasing, and a study focusing on the electrode structures is required to help address this issue.
In this thesis, the in-situ growing process of one-dimensional (1D) Pt-based nanostructures on gas diffusion layers (GDLs) was systematically studied to help understand the structure-property relationship of the gas diffusion electrodes (GDEs). The crystal nucleation and growth, coupled with the distribution of the produced nanostructures were investigated based on the corresponding GDE performance in PEFCs. The influence of the in-situ growing temperature, the hybridizing Pd metal and the structures of the GDL itself were comprehensively investigated for a further understanding of the in-situ nanowire growing process.
This work demonstrates that besides the intrinsic catalytic activities of the catalysts themselves, their optimal implementation in electrodes, i.e. the electrode structure, play an important role in the power performance of PEFCs than we initially expected
