A novel membrane-less direct alcohol fuel cell

• A membrane-less direct alcohol fuel cell was constructed.
• Anode catalyst was PdSnNi/MWCNT and cathode catalyst was Fe/C-PANI.
• Methanol, ethanol, propanol and butanol were used as the fuels.
• The cells with ethanol and n-propanol as fuels show the highest power density.

Membrane-less fuel cell possesses such advantages as simplified design and lower cost. In this paper, a membrane-less direct alcohol fuel cell is constructed by using multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) supported Pd and ternary PdSnNi composites as the anode catalysts and Fe/C-PANI composite, produced by direct pyrolysis of Fe-doped polyaniline precursor, as the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) catalyst. The alcohols investigated in the present study are methanol, ethanol, n-propanol, iso-propanol, n-butanol, iso-butanol and sec-butanol. The cathode catalyst Fe/C-PANI is electrochemically inactive to oxidation of the alcohols. The performance of the cell with various alcohols in 1 mol L−1 NaOH solution on either Pd/MWCNT or PdSnNi/MWCNT catalyst has been evaluated. In any case, the performance of the cell using the anode catalyst PdSnNi/MWCNT is considerably better than Pd/MWCNT. For the PdSnNi/MWCNT, the maximum power densities of the cell using methanol (0.5 mol L−1), ethanol (0.5 mol L−1), n-propanol (0.5 mol L−1), iso-propanol (0.5 mol L−1), n-butanol (0.2 mol L−1), iso-butanol (0.2 mol L−1) and sec-butanol (0.2 mol L−1) are 0.34, 1.03, 1.07, 0.44, 0.50, 0.31 and 0.15 mW cm−2, respectively.