Electroless Nickel Plating on Fibers for the Highly Porous Electrode

Abstract

:Materials used as fuel cell electrode should be light, high conductive, high surface area for reaction, catalytic surface and uniformity of porous structure. Nickel is widely used in electrode materials because it itself has catalytic properties. When used as electrode materials, nickel of only a few ìm on the surface may be sufficient to conduct the catalytic role. To manufacture the nickel with porous structure, Electroless nickel plating on carbon fiber be conducted. Because electroless nickel plating is possible to do uniform coating on the surface of substrate with complex shape. Acidic bath and alkaline bathe were used in electroless nickel plating bath, and pH and temperature of bath were controlled. The rate of electroless plating in alkaline bath was faster than that in acidic bath. As increasing pH and temperature, the rate of electrolee plating was increased. The content of phosphorous in nickel deposit was higher in acidic bath than that in alkaline bath. As a result, the uniform nickel deposit on porous carbon fiber was conducted.

Investigation of the Kinetics and Mass Transport Aspects of Hydrogen Evolution during Electroless Deposition of Nickel–Phosphorus

“…Chemical reaction pathways analogous to Reaction 6 have been proposed in other studies of electroless Ni-P deposition mediated by hypophosphite reductant. 37,38 Reaction 6 is consistent with the H 2 PO 2 -/H 2 stoichiometric ratio of ∼1 reported in observation (i) above. Furthermore, in alkaline conditions, the HPO 3 2− species (pro- duced via the Reaction 6) are known to be stable products of hypophosphite oxidation.…”

High-performance Fuel Cell with Stretched Catalyst-Coated Membrane: One-step Formation of Cracked Electrode

“…Recently, there have been several technical issues for the commercialization of PEMFC including water management at the cathode in the membrane electrode assembly (MEA) 5 6 7 8 and resistance reduction of the electrolyte membrane 9 10 . To improve transport of water generated from electrochemical reaction at the cathode, research has been conducted on inserting meso/macro pore structures such as platinum inverse opal structure and pore formers into the electrode, which methods need chemical post-treatments 11 12 13 14 15 . Moreover, there have been attempts to reduce the resistance of an electrolyte membrane by lowering the thickness of the membrane.…”