The correlation of electrochemical and fuel cell results for alcohol oxidation in acidic and alkaline media

When studying new catalyst materials, supports or ionomers for fuel cells electrochemical ex situ methods are often used because they are fast, repeatable and require only small amounts of studied material. However, caution must be applied in order to obtain correlations with the fuel cell experiments. In this publication detailed procedures for electrochemical and direct alcohol fuel cell (DAFC) experiments are described. These electrochemical results on Pt and PtRu catalyst in acidic and alkaline electrolytes are compared with DAFC results performed at the first time in both acidic (Nafion) and alkaline (FAA-2) electrolytes. The results highlight the importance of careful selection of the experimental conditions and measuring procedures: for methanol oxidation cyclic voltammetry provided good response for fuel cell experiments, whereas better correlation for ethanol and isopropanol oxidation was obtained with chronoamperometry at multiple potentials.

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► A method to prepare alkaline fuel cell ink with commercial anion exchange ionomer.
► CV is a good method to describe behaviour of methanol oxidation in DMFC.
► Chronoamperometry provides more insight for oxidation of several carbon compounds.
► The highest power density was obtained with isopropanol in Nafion – PtRu DAFC.
► The highest OCV was obtained with isopropanol in FAA-2 – PtRu DAFC.