DLR-DAAD Doctoral Fellowship Nr. 664: Critical raw materials-free/lean and durable electrocatalysts and electrodes for proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC)

Enter the fascinating world of the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) and help shape the future through research and innovation! We offer an exciting and inspiring working environment driven by the expertise and curiosity of our 11,000 employees from 100 nations and our unique infrastructure. Together, we develop sustainable technologies and thus contribute to finding solutions to global challenges. Would you like to join us in addressing this major future challenge? Then this is your place!

Our Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics in Stuttgart offers a

Nr. 664: Critical raw materials-free/lean and durable electrocatalysts and electrodes for proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC)

What to expect:

Your mission is to help pave the way for fuel cell technologies needed to decarbonize heavy-duty transport. Your goal is to advance the community in the development of materials for PEMFC aiming for exceptional stability, performance, and substantial reduction of use of critical raw materials. Achieving these goals is crucial to overcome current hurdles that hinder large scale market penetration of PEMFC.

For this purpose, you will use flame spray pyrolysis (FSP) techniques, which represent one-step and scalable production methods for nanomaterials synthesis. These techniques enable access to a broad range of nanomaterials including Pt-C structures, complex oxides, alloys, and meta-stable materials. FSP facilitates a high degree of scalability due to continues synthesis process and the possibility of direct deposition of the produced electrocatalysts as films due to one step production nature of the process. In the frame of your work, you will identify nanomaterials classes of interest for in-depth R&D to overcome the aforementioned hurdles. You will synthetize electrocatalysts by identifying and optimizing FSPcompatible precursor chemistry to accelerate the development of novel
materials. You will improve their electrochemical properties by optimizing the process parameters to qualify them for further processing into catalyst solutions for electrode fabrication.

Moreover, you will establish a reliable and reproducible method for the fabrication of electrode layers for PEMFC utilizing the developed electrocatalysts. Here, the focus is on the influence of the materials (catalyst, catalyst support, ionomer) and resulting solutions on electrochemical properties of the electrode layers. The technical relevance will be demonstrated at membrane electrode assemblies level using single cell and short stack setups under relevant operation

conditions. Performance and durability limitations will be analysed by electrochemical analysis techniques (I-V, EIS, CV, LSV, etc.) and sophisticated ex-situ and in-situ methods including FIB-SEM, EDX, XRD, XPS, AFM, NAP-XPS, etc. The achieved results are aimed to be published in renowned peer-review journals and presented at conferences. You will have the opportunity to be active in project acquisition and to supervise students.

Additionally, you will have opportunities to collaborate with other team members on suitable projects and to work with experts from other electrochemical energy conversion technologies, including high temperature fuel cells and membrane water electrolyzers.

What we expect from you:

What we offer:

DLR stands for diversity, appreciation and equality for all people. We promote independent work and the individual development of our employees both personally and professionally. To this end, we offer numerous training and development opportunities. Equal opportunities are of particular importance to us, which is why we want to increase the proportion of women in science and management in particular. Applicants with severe disabilities will be given preference if they are qualified.

Further information:

Starting date: As soon as possible
Type of employment: Full-time

Dr. Pawel Gazdzicki

E-Mail: pawel.gazdzicki@dlr.de