
This project is related to the understanding of transport/transfer of species in ionic conducting membranes. The results obtained will be used to develop new generations of protonic conducting membranes but some applications can be found in different domains as electrolysis, electrodialysis or fuel cells. The key point of this project concerns the development of original method of investigations to explain the mechanism of transport or transfer associated to mesostructured inorganic/organic membranes also called hybrid membranes. In general, previous projects were focused on the making of new protonic membranes able to replace favourably, in term of performances and costs, Nafion films. Nevertheless, the challenge seems not so easy and for the moment, attractive results were not obtained. Therefore, a fair understanding of the various mechanism involved in these films, ionic/water transport, ionic/water transfer, mechanical properties… is of prime interest. For that reason, different method of investigations, resolved in time and geometry, will be used. Indeed, the proton motion inside these films is complex and correlated to the time scale of observation. Consequently, to identify the mechanism of transport and transfer of the various species, coupling methods will be performed and adapted to our problem: electrochemical/contact angle measurements, electrochemical microscope/electrogravimetry, AFM/ infrared and electroacoustic/electrochemistry. The results obtained will be compared with structural analysis. From these results, more performant hybrid membranes will be expected.