Thesis director: Prof. Pascal Briois tel: +33 3 84 58 37 01 E-mail: [email protected] Thesis co-supervisor: Dr. Fei Gao tel: +33 3 84 58 38 01 E-mail: [email protected] CONTEXT: The fuel cell is seen as a potential energy conversion system in the future energy mix. Among the various types of fuel cells, proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) has shown great interest in its use in stationa...

Understanding the effect of two-phase flow in the components of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) is crucial to water management and subsequently to their performance. The local water saturation in the gas diffusion layer (GDL) and reactant channels influences the hydration of the membrane which has a direct effect on the PEMFC performance. Mass transport resistance includes contribu...

The electrochemically active area of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is investigated using conductive probe atomic force microscopy (CP-AFM). A platinum-coated AFM tip is used as a nanoscale cathode in an operating PEMFC. We present results that show highly inhomogeneous distributions of conductive surface domains at several length scales. At length scales on the order of the aqueo...

To improve the reliability and the energy efficiency of datacenters, as well as to reduce infrastructure costs and environmental impacts, we demonstrated and evaluated the use of a 10 kW Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) stack and system for powering the servers in a data center. In this study, we designed, tested and demonstrated a PEMFC system as a Distributed Generation (DG) prime m...

Chemically modified single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) with varying degrees of functionalization were utilized for the fabrication of SWNT thin film catalyst support layers (CSLs) in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), which were suitable for benchmarking against the US DOE 2017 targets. Use of the optimum level of SWNT -COOH functionality allowed the construction of a prototy...

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) are highly efficient power generators, being used recently in a clean hybrid power supply system. Comsol Multiphysics, a commercial solver based on the Finite Element Method (FEM) was used for developing a three dimensional model of a high temperature PEMFC in order to study operation mode and performance of the fuel cell. Cathode gas flow velocity in...

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells present a large number of difficulties for controller design, such as severe nonlinear dynamics, sign change in gain of the plant and possible starvation of the reactants. In this paper, we have presented an approach for circumventing these types of problems. The proper selection of manipulated variables, using an RGA analysis, circumvents the problem of sign...

The design of electrodes for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) is a delicate balancing of transport media. Conductance of gas, electrons, and protons must be optimized to provide efficient transport to and from the electrochemical reactions. This is accomplished through careful consideration of the volume of conducting media required by each phase and the distribution of the respe...

Concerns over increasing energy consumption coupled with the diminishing supply of fossil-fuels have led to increased research and development in several forms of alternate energy, among which is the polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell. One of the primary obstacles that must be overcome in the development of PEMFC’s is the source of hydrogen. PEMFC’s are extremely intolerant to impurit...