What is a Fuel Cell?

Figure 1. A cartoon of the fuel cell operating principle.

A fuel cell is an electrochemical engine (no moving parts) that converts the chemical energy of a fuel, such as hydrogen, and an oxidant, such as oxygen, directly to electricity with water vapour and heat being the only by-products released. The principal components of a fuel cell are the catalytically activated electrodes for the fuel (anode) and the oxidant (cathode) and an electrolyte to conduct ions between the two electrodes.

APPLICATION

Figure 1. Developing a non-pollute commute urban car. Prototypes already developed (BMW, GM…) It looks like an ordinary car. Also being developed in Australia.

Currently, there is a large interest in the development of technologies that have a low environmental impact. This is largely due to environmental concerns about global warming and the need to reduce CO2 emissions. Fuel cells offer a possible solution for the generation of clean energy. The proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) converts fuel energy (namely hydrogen and methanol) into electricity, heat, and water. There are two areas of interest for this project. Our first interest is in the polymer membrane used to transfer protons from the anode to the cathode. Currently, most fuel cell membranes operate with commercially available polymer electrolytes such as Nafion. Although, Nafion are good proton-exchange membranes, with fairly high chemical and thermal stabilities, it has some weaknesses such as material cost, a high membrane thickness (~ 50μm), weak mechanical properties and high methanol cross-over which causes the reduction of fuel consumption efficiencies. Our second interest lies in the optimization of electrode design to correctly distribute the amount of catalyst layer to reduce transport losses. This layer is directly applied to the membrane or into the gas diffusion layer. The objective is to place the catalyst particles such as platinum in close proximity with the membrane, the carbon particles and the gas fed pores. Our aim is to use plasma processing techniques to improve the efficiency of fuel cells.

Figure 2. A schematic and picture of the Perth fuel cell powered bus.

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