Design and Manufacturing of Cost-Effective Water Electrolyzers at Industrial Current Densities Via an Ink-Free Integrated Dual Electrode Assembly

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The clean and sustainable “green hydrogen” is highly attractive as an alternative energy.[1] However, the excessive cost of “green hydrogen” hinders its large-scale application, which is limited by the costly membrane electrode assembly (MEA) in proton exchange membrane electrolyzer cells (PEMECs).[2, 3] Conventional MEA fabrication involves numerous complex ink processes, resulting in a relatively high manufacturing costs. In addition, the ink-formed catalyst layers usually have poor electron conductivity and relatively large thickness, which causes significant catalyst underutilization.[3, 4] To simplify the manufacturing and increase the catalyst utilization, we revolutionize the conventional MEA via a facile ink-free and cost-effective integrated dual electrode assembly (IDEA) for reducing the costs and enhancing the performance of PEMECs. IDEA not only greatly simplifies fabrication processes of MEAs from over ten steps to three steps but also significantly increases hydrogen production rate simultaneously (45.26% more hydrogen at 1.8 V). Benefiting from the nano-thick catalyst layers, the IDEA can achieve an industrial “overload” current density of 6 A/cm2 at a low cell voltage of 1.82 V with an 83.9% noble catalyst saving, which outperforms most reported PEMECs. Particularly, the degradation rate of IDEA is only 24 μV/h at 1.8 A/cm2. References Pivovar, B., N. Rustagi, and S. Satyapal, Hydrogen at scale (H2@ Scale): key to a clean, economic, and sustainable energy system. The Electrochemical Society Interface, 2018. 27(1): p. 47.Ding, L., et al., Electrochemically grown ultrathin platinum nanosheet electrodes with ultralow loadings for energy-saving and industrial-level hydrogen evolution. Nano-Micro Letters, 2023. 15(1): p. 144.Mo, J., et al., Discovery of true electrochemical reactions for ultrahigh catalyst mass activity in water splitting. Science advances, 2016. 2(11): p. e1600690.Yang, G., et al., Role of electron pathway in dimensionally increasing water splitting reaction sites in liquid electrolytes. Electrochimica Acta, 2020. 362: p. 137113. Figure 1