Fuel Cell Charge Transport

Conduction is the process which dictates the transport of charges through the fuel cell layers, except for the membrane. That means that the lack of adequate contact between the diffusion layer, bipolar plates and cooling plates is the cause of most of the ohmic losses outside of the membrane. There is where most of the overall ohmic loss occur. To help solving that problem, either the membrane needs to be made thinner, or its material needs to be more conductive. History and tests given that, have told us that making the membrane thinner is easier than the alternative. The challenge with making the membrane material more conductive balancing that property with its thermal and chemical stability.

The image below describes the relationship between membrane thickness and local conductivity:

Source:

SPIEGEL, Colleen. PEM Fuel Cell Modeling and Simulation Using MATLAB^®. Burlington, MA, USA: Academic Press, 2008. 440 p.

Comments

History of Fuel Cells

Although fuel cells were not investigated much during the 1800s and 1900s, the credit for the invention of the first fuel cells goes to William Grove. Intensive research on the topic began in the 1960s with NASA and only recently has commercialization of the technology begun to be conceivable. The image below is a summary of the history of the fuel cells. Before William Grove had invented the first fuel cell in 1839, William Nicholson and Anthony Carlislie came up with the process of using electricity of break water into hydrogen and oxygen in 1800. Willian, then, based his first fuel cell on their discovery. The device, called the gas battery or "Grove cell", was a combination of " electrodes in a series circuit, with separate platinum electrodes in oxygen and hydrogen submerged in a dilute sulfuric acid electrolyte solution" and it generated 12 amps of current at about 1.8 volts. NASA began research on fuel cells for Project Gemini, which employed th

Solar Cells Losses and Design Part 1

We have discussed some important properties of light and characteristics of the radiation of light by our sun. In this post, we will focus on converting that light to electrical energy. This is done using the photovoltaic effect. Photovoltaics covers the direct conversion of sunlight into electrical energy, by a semiconductor material. The term photovoltaics is derived from the Greek word ‘phos’ which means light, and volt, which refers to electricity, specifically voltage. Volt is a reference to the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, who invented the battery photovoltaic effect that was discovered in 1839, by the French physicist Emond Becquerel. At the age of 19 Becquerel created the first photovoltaic cell by illuminating platinum electrodes, coated with silver chloride in an acid solution. This device was the first to convert light into electricity. The photovoltaic effect occurs through the generation of a potential difference at the junction of two different material

Black Carbon is Found in the Amazon River after Forest Fires

In addition to the tracks of destruction in the forest, the fires in the Amazon leave traces in the Amazon River and its tributaries. Incomplete burning of tree wood results in the production of a type of carbon - known as black carbon - that reaches Amazonian waters in the forms of charcoal and soot and is transported to the Atlantic Ocean as dissolved organic carbon. An international group of researchers quantified and characterized, for the first time, the black carbon that flows through the Amazon River. The results of the study, published in Nature Communications magazine, showed that most of the material transferred to the ocean is "young," suggesting that it was produced by recent forest fires. "We found through radiometric dating analysis [a method that uses the radioisotope of natural carbon-14 occurrence to determine the age of carbonaceous materials up to about 60,000 years] and molecular composition that the largest proportion of the black carbon we found

The Environmental Engineering Hub

Search This Blog