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The chemical and morphological structure of polymer electrolyte directly determines their properties applied as proton exchange membrane. Different chemical structure design of sulfonated poly(arylene ether sulfone) may result in different morphological structure and properties. In this article, three sulfonated poly(arylene ether sulfone)s with similar backbone but varied side groups, that is, with fluoropheny side group (SEF), cyanogroupson side group (SEB) and without any side group introduction (SES), were cast into membranes. The properties such as the proton conductivity, water uptake, dimensional stability, and H₂/O₂ single cell performance of the membranes were characterized and compared with each other. The morphological structures of them were observed using FE-SEM. The proton conductivities of them did not show much diversity, ranging from 0.158 to 0.197 S/cm, while the performance of a single proton exchange membrane fuel cell exhibited great different, the maximum power density of the SEF and SEB reached 115.5mw/cm² and 94.7 mw/cm² compared to 72.5 mw/cm² for SES at 80 ^oC. From the FE-SEM images, the smaller size of separated hydrophobic domain, cross-linked and more uniform distribution of hydrophilic domains was observed in SEF and SEB than in SES. The results indicated that the introduction of suitable side group, such as fluorophenyl, to sulfonated poly(arylene ether sulfone) might contribute to its overall performance as one of candidate materials for proton exchange membrane.

Sulfonated Poly(arylene ether sulfone); Chemical Structure; Morphological Structure; Proton Exchange Membrane