The Fuel Cell Commercialization Conference of Japan (FCCJ) revised in 2011 a part of the target performance, durability, and cost of fuel cells for transportation application based on the latest technical data and knowledge obtained from the vehicle tests in the public thoroughfare and the simple systems to be expected in the commercialization stage. FCCJ also updated a methodology for testing membrane-electrode assemblies (MEAs) and its materials: electrolyte membranes and electrocatalysts. This revision is intended to assist the development of materials for industry, university, and research institutes from practicality, simplicity, and convenience points of view. The purpose of this paper is to describe the revised targets and the updated evaluation methods with the background technical information related to fuel cell vehicles (FCVs).

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The electrocatalytic activity for the hydrogen oxidation reaction (HOR) in the presence of 1000 ppm of CO has been investigated on a series of binary Pt alloy catalysts Pt–M (M = Fe, Co, Ni), having two atomic layers of stabilized Pt skin (Pt2AL), supported on carbon black (Pt2AL–PtFe/C, Pt2AL–PtCo/C, and Pt2AL–PtNi/C) in 0.1 M HClO4 solution at 70 and 90 °C. It was found that Pt2AL–PtFe/C exhibited the highest CO-tolerant HOR activity (with respect to the area-specific activity j s and the mass activity MA), followed by Pt2AL–PtCo/C and Pt2AL–PtNi/C. Such an order of the j s values for the HOR with and without adsorbed CO can be correlated with density functional theory calculations, which have enabled us to propose a mechanism for the HOR on these surfaces. The apparent values of MA for the HOR on Pt2AL–PtFe/C at 20 mV vs RHE were 2–3 times larger than those for the conventional commercial catalyst c-Pt2Ru3/C over the whole CO coverage range from 0 to 0.7 at 70 and 90 °C. For an accelerated durability test simulating air exposure (2500 potential cycles between 0.02 and 0.95 V), the apparent j s values for the CO-tolerant HOR on these Pt-skin catalysts were maintained completely, indicating that the dealloying of M components was virtually suppressed, whereas a significant reduction in j s was observed for c-Pt2Ru3/C. A great mitigation of the particle agglomeration was also a highly attractive property of our catalysts in comparison with the commercial catalysts c-Pt/C and c-Pt2Ru3/C.