The water electrolysis technology using proton exchange membranes (PEM) has now become more widespread in its use due to its simple operation and maintenance and high productivity per unit volume as an intensive and high-efficiency water electrolysis technology that can directly produce high-purity, high-pressure hydrogen without special ancillary devices. Despite these advantages over alkali water electrolysis technology, which is widely industrialized across the world now, its disadvantage is high cost. It is attributable to the high cost of proton exchange membranes and electrode catalysts for them.
Ho Kuk Chol, a post-graduate student at the Institute of Nano Science and Technology, prepared ATO-supported IrO2-RuO2 composite catalysts as anodic catalysts in PEMWE by using the Adams method and investigated their electrochemical and water electrolytic properties.
When the Ir content was 30% for the IrO2-RuO2 composite catalyst and 80% for the supported catalyst, the catalysts had current density of 77.5mA/cm2 at the voltage of 1.5V in 0.5mol/L H2SO4 solution. The stability experiments in the same solution showed that the supported composite catalyst had almost the same stability as IrO2. It was concluded that the prepared catalyst showed almost the same performance with 60% reduction in cost compared to IrO2 catalysts.