ABSTRACT
The scientic community has made great progress in increasing the durability of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) systems, but durability must further increase before we can consider fuel cells economically viable [1]. As durability increases, new modes of fuel cell contamination and failure are exposed. We expect state of the art PEMFC systems to run for thousands of hours. This means that each sulfonate group in typical per-uorosulfonic acid (PFSA) membranes used in today’s PEMFC systems will associate with several million protons over the lifetime of the systems. Even if other cations replace only a small fraction of the protons entering the electrolyte membrane, these contaminant cations can build up in the system and degrade the fuel cell system performance over time.
