Research Progress, Trends, and Current State of Development on PEMFC-New Insights from a Bibliometric Analysis and Characteristics of Two Decades of Research Output

Ephraim Bonah Agyekum, Jeffrey Dankwa Ampah, Tabbi Wilberforce, Sandylove Afrane, Christabel Nutakor

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

Abstract

The consumption of hydrogen could increase by sixfold in 2050 compared to 2020 levels, reaching about 530 Mt. Against this backdrop, the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) has been a major research area in the field of energy engineering. Several reviews have been provided in the existing corpus of literature on PEMFC, but questions related to their evolutionary nuances and research hotspots remain largely unanswered. To fill this gap, the current review uses bibliometric analysis to analyze PEMFC articles indexed in the Scopus database that were published between 2000-2021. It has been revealed that the research field is growing at an annual average growth rate of 19.35%, with publications from 2016 to 2012 alone making up 46% of the total articles available since 2000. As the two most energy-consuming economies in the world, the contributions made towards the progress of PEMFC research have largely been from China and the US. From the research trend found in this investigation, it is clear that the focus of the researchers in the field has largely been to improve the performance and efficiency of PEMFC and its components, which is evident from dominating keywords or phrases such as 'oxygen reduction reaction', 'electrocatalysis', 'proton exchange membrane', 'gas diffusion layer', 'water management', 'polybenzimidazole', 'durability', and 'bipolar plate'. We anticipate that the provision of the research themes that have emerged in the PEMFC field in the last two decades from the scientific mapping technique will guide existing and prospective researchers in the field going forward.
Original languageEnglish
Article number1103
Number of pages33
JournalMembranes
Volume12
Issue number11
Early online date4 Nov 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2022

Bibliographical note

© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Keywords

  • PEMFC performance and efficiency
  • proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC)
  • hydrogen
  • bibliometric analysis
  • durability
  • gas diffusion layer

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