• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.301-307
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• 2010

Actuation using a shape memory alloy (SMA) is considered to be an important technology that will play a leading role in market for next-generation medical devices because an SMA actuator can accurately imitate skillful and delicate hand movements. However, SMA actuators have not been successfully used because of problems in control design caused by the nonlinear hysteresis effect of SMA, which leads to inaccuracies in control systems. In order to overcome the effect, the authors invented a SMA actuator, which could actively and rapidly cool down and heat up, by combining a SMA catheter and a TE module using the Peltier effect. In order to evaluate the TE characteristics of our TE module system, the changes in the temperature with 1) incremental increases in a continuous electric current and 2) the appearance of a discontinuous constant or reverse current are discussed in this paper.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.8 no.2 s.23
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• pp.15-27
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• 2004

The purpose of this paper is to improve the performance of Polymer electrolyte fuel cell(PEMFC) by studying the channel dimension of bipolar plates using commercial CFD program 'Fluent'. Simulations are done ranging from 0.5 to 3.0mm for different size in order to find the channel size which shoves the highst hydrogen consumption. The results showed that the smaller channel width, land width, channel depth, the higher hydrogen consumption in anode. When channel width is increased, the pressure drop in channel is decreased because total channel length Is decreased, and when land width is increased, the net hydrogen consumption is decreased because hydrogen is diffused under the land width. It is also found that the influence of hydrogen consumption is larger at different channel width than it at different land width. The change of hydrogen consumption with different channel depth isn't as large as it with different channel width, but channel depth has to be small as can as it does because it has influence on the volume of bipolar plates. however the hydrogen utilization among the channel sizes more than 1.0mm which can be machined in reality is the most at channel width 1.0, land width 1.0, channel depth 0.5mm and considered as optimum channel size. The fuel cell combined with 2cm${\times}$2cm diagonal or serpentine type flow field and MEA(Membrane Electrode Assembly) is tested using 100W PEMFC test station to confirm that the channel size studied in simulation. The results showed that diagonal and serpentine flow field have similarly high OCV and current density of diagonal (low field is higher($2-40mA/m^2$) than that of serpentine flow field under 0.6 voltage, but the current density of serpentine type has higher performance($5-10mA/m^2$) than that of diagonal flow field under 0.7-0.8 voltage.