Experimental investigation on the effect of mixed acids etched nickel foam electrode on performance of an alkaline direct ethanol fuel cell

Abstract

The three-dimensional porous materials represented by nickel foam have broad application prospects in the fuel cell field due to their excellent physical properties (high conductivity, high porosity and high specific surface area, etc.). However, the smooth nickel foam skeleton not only limits the loadable amount of active materials, but also reduces the utilization efficiency of loaded active materials. Therefore, increasing the roughness of the nickel foam skeleton to improve the utilization of active materials has far-reaching significance for the practical application. In this paper, we used mixed acids solution to etch the nickel foam and investigated the effect of etched nickel foam electrode on the performance of an alkaline direct ethanol fuel cell. It was found that mixed acids etching treatment can significantly improve the roughness of nickel foam skeleton and had a great influence on the ethanol oxidation half-reaction (EOR), while the effect on the single cell performance can negligible. Therefore, we believe that the pretreatment method of nickel foam has little effect on the performance of high loading actual electrode.