Active water management at the cathode of a planar air-breathing polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell using an electroosmotic pump |
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Authors: | T Fabian S Litster JG Santiago |
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Affiliation: | a Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA b Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO 80401, USA |
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Abstract: | In a typical air-breathing fuel cell design, ambient air is supplied to the cathode by natural convection and dry hydrogen is supplied to a dead-ended anode. While this design is simple and attractive for portable low-power applications, the difficulty in implementing effective and robust water management presents disadvantages. In particular, excessive flooding of the open-cathode during long-term operation can lead to a dramatic reduction of fuel cell power. To overcome this limitation, we report here on a novel air-breathing fuel cell water management design based on a hydrophilic and electrically conductive wick in conjunction with an electroosmotic (EO) pump that actively pumps water out of the wick. Transient experiments demonstrate the ability of the EO-pump to “resuscitate” the fuel cell from catastrophic flooding events, while longer term galvanostatic measurements suggest that the design can completely eliminate cathode flooding using less than 2% of fuel cell power, and lead to stable operation with higher net power performance than a control design without EO-pump. This demonstrates that active EO-pump water management, which has previously only been demonstrated in forced-convection fuel cell systems, can also be applied effectively to miniaturized (<5 W) air-breathing fuel cell systems. |
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Keywords: | Portable-power Cathode flooding Micro-fuel cell Fuel cell system design Wick |
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