An Experimental Study of Scale-up, Oxidant, and Response Characteristics in PEM Fuel Cells

Abstract

It is important for fuel cell to become flexible in order to accommodate the situations of application areas for reducing costs and expanding coverage. Scale ups in series and parallel to 1-kW class proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell stack are characterized experimentally with oxidant as air and oxygen. Through a serial scaled-up 4-cell stack with an active area of 25 cm 2 and a parallel scaled-up single cell with an active area of 100 cm 2 , respectively, the 1-kW class 20-cell stack with an active area of 150 cm 2 per cell is scaled up from the basic unit cell with maintaining their performances. The polarization and power curves of the 1-kW class PEM fuel cell stack with the reactants H 2 /air and H 2 /O 2 are evaluated. Sufficient power of the PEM fuel cell can operate at flexible nominal current of 40-80 A and nominal voltage of 12-15 V for providing durability and balance between cells. The 1-kW class PEM fuel cell stack is characterized through the comparison of cell voltage differences utilizing H 2 /air and H 2 /O 2 . Both cell voltages with H 2 /air and H 2 /O 2 follow well the one-twentieth of the responding stack voltages with the small difference. Index Terms-Design for experiments, fuel cells, performance analysis, power measurement.

Dynamic simulations of under-rib convection-driven flow-field configurations and comparison with experiment in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells

“…The PEMFC performance was evaluated by measuring the polarization curve while adjusting the operating conditions, such as pressure, temperature, humidity, flow rate and reacting gas, as listed in Table 4 [19]. To measure the experimental evidence of the enhanced PEMFC performance caused by the under-rib convection shown in Fig.…”

Fault tolerant control of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell using Takagi–Sugeno virtual actuators

“…Proton exchange membrane (PEM, also known as polymer electrolyte membrane) fuel cells are electrochemical devices which directly convert the chemical energy of hydrogen into electrical energy [1]. Fuel cell systems offer a clean alternative to energy production and are a very active research field because of many possible applications in distributed generation solutions [2].…”