Development of high performance solid polymer electrolyte water electrolyzer in WE-NET

Fuji Electric Corporate Research and Development, Ltd. has been developing technologies for high performance solid polymer electrolyte water electrolyzers. In term of technical features, Fuji Electric's technological approach call for membrane-electrode assemblies to be formed by a hot-press method. In the development activities, diverse types of current collectors were test-produced by changing coating materials and methods and various types of 50 cm/sup 2/ membrane-electrode assemblies were fabricated by changing anode catalyst species, membrane species and catalyst loading amount. Based on the results of the performance evaluations of those samples, the authors have obtained a test-produced high performance electrolyzer with platinum-plated titanium fiber plate, gold-plated stainless steel fiber plate and a membrane-electrode assembly composed of iridium dioxide, platinum black and perfluorocarbon sulfonic acid membrane, which registered 1.53 V of cell voltage and 99.2% of current efficiency and 95.8% of energy efficiency for a current density of 1A/cm/sup 2/ at a temperature of 80/spl deg/C, under atmospheric pressure.