Abstract
The electron beam melting (EBM) additive manufacturing technology was used to fabricate titanium liquid/gas diffusion media with high-corrosion resistances and well-controllable multifunctional parameters, including two-phase transport and excellent electric/thermal conductivities, has been first demonstrated. Their applications in proton exchange membrane eletrolyzer cells have been explored in-situ in a cell and characterized ex-situ with SEM and XRD. Compared with the conventional woven liquid/gas diffusion layers (LGDLs), much better performance with EBM fabricated LGDLs is obtained due to their significant reduction of ohmic loss. The EBM technology components exhibited several distinguished advantages in fabricating gas diffusion layer: well-controllable pore morphology and structure, rapid prototyping, fast manufacturing, highly customizing and economic. In addition, by taking advantage of additive manufacturing, it possible to fabricate complicated three-dimensional designs of virtually any shape from a digital model into one single solid object faster, cheaper and easier, especially for titanium. More importantly, this development will provide LGDLs with control of pore size, pore shape, pore distribution, and therefore porosity and permeability, which will be very valuable to develop modeling and to validate simulations of electrolyzers with optimal and repeatable performance. Further, it will lead to a manufacturing solution to greatly simplify the PEMEC/fuel cell components and to couple the LGDLs with other parts, since they can be easily integrated together with this advanced manufacturing process
