Nor Arbani Sean, Sheela Chandren, Juhana Jaafar, Mohd Hafiz Dzarfan Othman, Hadi Nur
Designing magnetically oriented polybenzimidazole (PBI) as a proton exchange membrane (PEM) with short proton-conducting pathways could provide insight into the advancement of PEM in high-temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cells (HT-PEMFCs) applications. In this work, ferrocene (Fc) functionality as the alignment agent was introduced into the PBI backbones in the presence of an external magnetic field. The effect of the oriented structure of PBI-Fc-based membranes on their chemical stability and proton conductivity performance was evaluated. The Fenton test was conducted to study the oxidative degradation of the membrane, and significant chemical stability was observed. In the end, the possible mechanism of the oxidative degradation of the membranes was proposed, and high proton conductivity of up to 0.024 Scm−1 is obtained at 180 °C for the through-plane PBI-Fc-based membrane with 5 wt% of Fc (PBI-Fc-5 (III)). Therefore, it is shown that the PBI-Fc-5 (III) membrane is a potential membrane for HT-PEMFCs applications. © 2025 Elsevier B.V.
Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, UTM, Johor, Johor Bahru, 81310, Malaysia; Centre for Sustainable Nanomaterials, Ibnu Sina Institute for Scientific and Industrial Research, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, UTM, Johor, Johor Bahru, 81310, Malaysia; Advanced Membrane Technology Research Centre (AMTEC), Faculty of Chemical and Energy Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor, Skudai, 81310, Malaysia; Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Universitas Negeri Malang, Jawa Timur, 65145, Indonesia; Center of Advanced Materials for Renewable Energy (CAMRY), Universitas Negeri Malang, Malang, 65145, Indonesia
