Penn Engineering Professor Receives $2.2 Million Grant to Research Fuel Cell Technology

Penn School of Engineering professors receive $2.2 million in grants to research fuel cell technology.

The Penn engineering professor received $2.2 million from the Department of Energy to fund research to synthesize cleaner, more efficient fuel cell technology.

Karen Winey — Harold Pender Professor of Chemistry and Biomolecular Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering — Researched new fluorine-free polymers to address the toxicity of the fluorine-based polymers currently used to convert hydrogen into electricity. I am working on a project to design. According to Penn Engineering’s blog post,

A grant from the DOE, distributed over three years, will allow Wyney’s team to “reveal a more detailed picture of the internal structure of these polymers, revealing the fundamental role of water in determining ion transport properties.” can.”

Karen Winnie Harold Pender, Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, told Penn Engineering:

A detailed understanding of how protons and hydroxide ions move within hydrated polymers is possible only through highly coordinated efforts of this kind.

According to the blog post, fuel cells are becoming more important as the demand for electrical energy increases. The power of fuel cells lies in their ability to convert large amounts of hydrogen into abundant electricity without emitting carbon dioxide. That’s enough for a home emergency stockpile or to power a vehicle.

The electrolyte composition of a fuel cell determines how quickly the cell’s fuel is converted to energy and insulates the electrodes from each other.

Today, Nafion is the leading solid polymer electrolyte found in fuel cells, according to a Penn Engineering blog post from August 2021. However, Nafion’s fluorine-based chemicals are costly due to their high price and environmental toxicity.

As governments around the world consider proposals to ban fluoropolymers, Winey has begun to tackle the challenge by using fluorine-free polymers with “precisely placed sulfonic acid groups.” .

Upon contact with water, the sulfonic acid groups can assemble into fully connected pathways forming complex channels through which protons flow. According to Penn Engineering, these channels can be expanded further simply by exposing the polymer to humidity.

DOE grants fund research collaborations between Penn’s Winey Lab, Sandia National Laboratories, Penn State University, and Florida State University.

The grant follows an August 2021 collaborative project involving members of the Wine Lab, the Center for Integrated Nanotechnology at Sandia National Laboratories, and Florida State University. The team then showed that the proton conductivity of the new fluorine-free polymer increased with water content, exceeding that of Nafion.

According to Penn Engineering, although a promising finding, further investigation is needed to confirm the viability of this new polymer.

This joint DOE grant is the second grant Winey has received in recent years. In August 2022, Winney said he received a $3.25 million grant from Penn and his collaborators at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to focus on developing polymer-to-polymer conversions to reduce polymer waste. Penn his engineering reports.

Winey also received the 2023 Award in Polymer Chemistry from the American Chemical Society “for outstanding contributions to the understanding and advancement of polymer nanocomposites and ion-containing polymers, particularly structural control and transport dynamics,” announced Sept. 9. was awarded.

ACS is one of the world’s largest scientific organizations, with more than 151,000 members in 140 countries, dedicated to “advancing the broader chemical enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of the planet and its people.” I have a mission.

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Oct. 13, 2022 Penn Engineering Professor Receives $2.2 Million Grant to Research Fuel Cell Technology