휴대용 연료전지 시스템의 소음 저감에 대한 연구

A Study on the Noise Reduction of a Portable Fuel Cell System

In this paper, a study on the noise reduction in a mobile fuel cell system is presented. Among various fuel cell systems around 20W capacities designed for mobile electronic devices, the active direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) systems have been recently developed. In such systems, the primary noise source is the air pump which provides sufficient air flow ($5{\sim}6$ liter/min) for electrochemical reaction with methanol fuel while the noise contributions from other auxiliary parts are relatively small. Especially, the discrete noise tones generated by the air pump are dominant and those frequency peaks related to the rotor harmonics are needed to be suppressed by a silencer. Therefore. the Herschel/Quinke (HQ) tubes, which use the out-of-phase cancellation of acoustic waves propagating through direct and indirect pathways, are applied to the inlet of the air pump. Performance of noise reduction with HQ silencer is analytically estimated by calculating the transmission. The length and number of thin HQ tubes are optimized to decrease the radiated noise. As a result, the sound pressure level could be successfully reduced by about 10 dB after applying three serially connected HQ tubes.