Proton-Conducting Poly-γ-glutamic Acid Nanofiber Embedded Sulfonated Poly(ether sulfone) for Proton Exchange Membranes

Development and fabrication of novel proton exchange membranes (PEMs) with excellent performance have a great significance to the commercial application of PEM fuel cell. Inspired from the proton-conducting mechanism, γ-poly(glutamic acid) (γ-PGA) nanofibers (NFs) are first fabricated by solution blowing with the help of polylactic acid (PLA) and designed to form amino acid arrays as efficient proton channels for PEMs. The NFs with 50% γ-PGA exhibit a high proton conductivity of 0.572 S cm–1 at 80 °C/50% relative humidity (RH), and 1.28 S cm–1 at 40 °C/90% RH. Density functional theory is carried out to explain the mechanisms of proton hopping in γ-PGA, and the activation energy barriers from NH to COO– for trans and cis conformations under anhydrous conditions are only 0.64 and 0.62 eV, respectively. Then the γ-PGA/PLA NFs are incorporated into sulfonated poly(ether sulfone) to prepare PEMs, which show remarkable performance compared with the Nafion membrane. The composite membrane with 30 wt % NFs exhibits the highest proton conductivity (0.261 S cm–1 at 80 °C/100% RH). The direct methanol fuel cells with this membrane show a maximum power density (202.3 mW cm–2) among all of the PEMs, showing great application potential in the field of PEMs.