Harry R. Allcock and Shih-To Fei
Graduate Assistant, Department of Chemistry
The Pennsylvania State University
Phosphazenes have high potential as energy materials such as polymer electrolytes due to the tunable chemistry as well as their thermal and electrochemical stability. One focus of our research is the development of membrane materials for biofuel-based energy generators such as direct methanol or ethanol fuel cells, as this leads to a combination of the high efficiency and low pollution emission with a renewable biomass fuel source. The polyorganophosphazene membranes we have developed showed good performance as proton-conducting materials. Recently, we have also developed new phosphazene systems that show very low methanol permeation, which should further increase the overall efficiency.