Characteristics of Performance Degradation and CO2 Emissions in Starved Operation of DMFC

Abstract

The fatal performance decay caused by potential reversal in a single cell of a DMFC stack under methanol starved operation was investigated. As a result, it was made clear that the decay could be attributed to carbon corrosion in anode catalyst which depended on the oxygen which was made by the anode reaction of water electrolysis in starved operation. In this study, water oxidation and carbon corrosion was confirmed by measuring O2 and CO2 emissions in anode off-gas. The active surface area loss of the anode catalyst was also detected by cyclic voltammetry (CV) and the way to minimize MEA performance degradation is proposed.