The flow field of a bipolar plate distributes hydrogen and oxygen for polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells and removes the produced water from the fuel cells. It greatly influences the performance of fuel cells, especially regarding reduction of mass transport loss. Flow fields with good reactant distribution capability reduce the mass transport loss, thus allowing higher power density...

Experimental analysis and CFD modeling is used in this work to analyze system efficiency related to hydrogen purge based water management in an open-cathode PEM fuel cell system. Excess water in a deadended anode decreases hydrogen concentration at the active catalyst surface and thus causes fuel cell performance losses. Purging the anode with hydrogen removes water and nitrogen that diffused t...

Online monitoring humidity in the proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell is an important issue in maintaining proper membrane humidity. The cost and size of existing sensors for monitoring humidity are prohibitive for online measurements. Online prediction of humidity using readily available measured data would be beneficial to water management. In this paper, a novel soft sensor method based...

Hydrogen fuel cells are increasingly seen as the propulsion technology of the future for road transport. However, despite the potential of this technology to reduce the environmental impact of road transport and to improve energy efficiency, both technical and economic barriers need to be overcome for it to be successfully introduced in mass markets. At Imperial College we are currently underta...

The availability of low-cost, efficient, and durable catalysts for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) is a prerequisite for commercialization of the fuel cell technology. Along with intensive research efforts of more than half a century in developing nonprecious metal catalysts (NPMCs) to replace the expensive and scarce platinum-based catalysts, a new class of carbon-based, low-cost, metal-free O...

One of the issues that need to be addressed in order to improve the durability and efficiency of a PEM fuel cell system is the management of the hydrogen feeding procedure. It has been demonstrated these aspects are improved when a hydrogen recirculation systems are used [1]. In this work, an ejector has been designed and manufactured and implemented in an experimental PEM fuel cell Test Statio...

The dynamic models for the fuel cell power and the configuration of the fuel cell distributed generation system are shown in this paper. Due to nonlinear characteristics of fuel cell model, the output voltage of fuel cell varies greatly when the load changes. A novel interface is designed to provide a constant output voltage for charging of the battery bank of the fuel cell distributed generati...

A silicon-based microfabricated fuel cell running on formic acid vapor as a fuel has been developed to provide on-chip power for MEMS devices, without using any ancillary devices such as heaters, water management, air pumps, etc. As a demonstration instrument, an integrated silicon-based membrane electrode assembly and fuel evaporative structure was packaged in a plastic package to test the vap...

The objective of this project is to create clean fuel for transportation using hydrogen powered by solar energy. Hydrogen has been generated by solar photovoltaic (PV) array and then collected for data analysis to demonstrate efficiency of the hydrogen production in all the steps of the experiment. The hydrogen produced from the electrolysis process was either stored in a metal hydride canister...