Abstract
This paper investigated environmental effects for passive, air-breathing, and vapor-feeding direct methanol fuel cells. In these experiments, experimental parameters are temperature($30^{\circ}C$, $40^{\circ}C$ and relative humidity(25%, 50%, 75%). From these experimental results, the water contents play a key role in terms of optimal ionic conductivity at the cathode catalyst layer. In case of pure methanol feeding, the performance is inversely proportional to the relative humidity. The water generation resulting from methanol crossover maintains ionic conductivity at the cathode. On the contrary, diluted methanol solution (50wt.%) lowers methanol crossover to the cathode. In order to increase ionic conductivity, the relatively high humidity is required to the cathode catalyst layer for the water generation. The relative humidity scales with the performance.
