(585b) Designing Biomimetic Ionomers to Attain Favorable Interfacial Phenomena in Energy Technologies

In revolutionizing the performance of electrochemical technologies, understanding, and tweaking interfacial phenomena can play critical roles. To that end, energy technologies, such as H-fuel cells suffer from ion transport limitation at ionomer-catalyst interfaces which slows down the oxygen reduction reaction and impairs the performance of these devices. However, our decades-long understanding of bulk membrane separators cannot guide in predicting the behavior of sub-micron thick ionomer layers at catalyst interfaces due to the very different constraints of thick and thin materials. We have recently unveiled the potential of several biomimetic/nature-inspired ionomers in overcoming interfacial ion transport limitation by boosting ionic conductivity in thin films. This talk will show how these ionomers, by changing the interfacial organizations and interactions, can help to improve ion transport behavior in sub-micron thick layers. We consolidate the findings on distributed physical and ion/water transport properties across ionomer thin films (using microscopy, scattering and electrochemical techniques) to identify the critical parameters needing attention while designing catalyst binders to advance critical interfacial processes and clean energy technologies thereby.