A novel strategy for accelerating degradation of proton exchange membranes in fuel cell

Conventional proton exchange membrane (PEM) durability testing takes thousands of hours, which is consuming and costly. The development of a suitable accelerated aging strategy for PEM is essential for its durability research. In this work, we proposed and verified electron beam as an accelerated decay method to investigate the degradation of PEM. This solution is hundreds of times faster than in-duty durability testing. The results showed that different equivalents of radiation have different effects on the attenuation of PEM, which corresponds to different stage of the duty decay of PEM. As the irradiation dose gradually increases, the open-circuit voltage of the corresponding cell gradually decreases and the amount of hydrogen seepage gradually increases, which is the same phenomenon as the duty degradation of the PEM. The Pearson correlation coefficient was adopted to correlate accelerated decay data with duty decay data, the results exhibited that the correlation coefficient is close to 1 (0.9169457), with a high degree of correlation. This indicates that the electron beam accelerated decay of PEM has a very high similarity to the duty decay. Therefore, this accelerated decay scheme has great promise for highly durable PEM studies.