Pt-Ni and Pt-Co Catalyst Synthesis Route for Fuel Cell Applications

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California

Oxygen reduction reactions (ORRs) at the cathode are the rate-limiting step in fuel cell performance. The ORR is 100 times slower than the corresponding hydrogen oxidation at the anode. Speeding up the reaction at the cathode will improve fuel cell efficiency.

The cathode material is generally Pt powder painted onto a substrate (e.g., graphite paper). Recent efforts in the fuel cell area have focused on replacing Pt with Pt-X alloys (where X = Co, Ni, Zr, etc.) in order to (a) reduce cost, and (b) increase ORR rates. One of these strategies is to increase ORR rates by reducing the powder size, which would result in an increase in the surface area, thereby facilitating faster reaction rates.

In this work, a process has been developed that creates Pt-Ni or Pt-Co alloys that are finely divided (on the nano scale) and provide equivalent performance at lower Pt loadings. Lower Pt loadings will translate to lower cost.

Precursor salts of the metals are dissolved in water and mixed. Next, the salt mixtures are dried on a hot plate. Finally, the dried salt mixture is heat-treated in a furnace under flowing reducing gas. The catalyst powder is then used to fabricate a membrane electrode assembly (MEA) for electrochemical performance testing. The Pt-Co catalystbased MEA showed comparable performance to an MEA fabricated using a standard Pt black fuel cell catalyst.

The main objective of this program has been to increase the overall efficiencies of fuel cell systems to support power for manned lunar bases. This work may also have an impact on terrestrial programs, possibly to support the effort to develop a carbon-free energy source. This catalyst can be used to fabricate high-efficiency fuel cell units that can be used in space as regenerative fuel cell systems, and terrestrially as primary fuel cells. Terrestrially, this technology will become increasingly important when transition to a hydrogen economy occurs.

This work was done by Samad A. Firdosy, Vilupanur A. Ravi, Thomas I. Valdez, and Adam Kisor of Caltech; and Sri R. Narayan of USC for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NPO-47885