MOISE

Water Electrolysis is potentially one of the most environment-friendly hydrogen production processes. However, the large-scale deployment of PEM water electrolysis will be prevented in the near future by limited iridium resources (IrO2 is the conventional catalyst used at the anode side for water oxidation into molecular oxygen). Hence, the objective of the MOISE project is to decrease the necessary amount of Ir by a factor of 5, improving the mass activity of oxygen-evolving PEM anodes compared to the state-of-art (SoA). Such an evolution will participate to the developement of efficient and cost-effective PEM Water Electrolysdis for large scale H2 production To reach this ambitious goal, our strategy is to replace SoA unsupported IrO2 particles with IrO2 nanoparticles or M-rich core@Ir-rich shell nanoparticles (with M a transition metal element) coated on a substrate of appropriate electronic conductivity, morphology and electrochemical stability: porous doped tin dioxide used as catalyst support. The novelty will come from our ability to elaborate this catalyst support with two different and innovative microstructures that will be compared: aerogels and nanotubes/fibers. Different innovations and improvements will result from this project: (i) elaboration of catalyst supports of appropriate composition and morphology; (ii) development of optimized processes for iridium dioxide deposition; (iii) determination of appropriate ink composition; (iv) manufacturing of optimized membrane-electrode assemblies. After optimization and validation (in terms of initial performance and durability) these innovative materials will be tested in short stack configuration in real application conditions in view of commercial applications.