• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.286-286
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• 2009

A small PEM fuel cell has two different stack configurations such as active and passive stacks. The active stack has a distintion of high power density although it makes system complex by using alr blower and related BOPs resulting in large system volume. On the contrary, passive stack has an advantage of compact system because it doesn't need air supplying devices although it reveals relatively low stack power density. In this study we fabricated two 10W PEMFC stacks with different stack configurations, active and passive stacks, and tested their performance and stability. The active stack consists of 13cells with an active area of $5cm^2$. The passive stack has 12cells with an active area of $16cm^2$. When we compared the stack performance of those stacks, the active stack showed higher power density compared to the passive stack, particularly at high voltage regions. However, at low voltage and high current regions, the passive stack performance was comparable to the active stack. The stack stability was largely dependent on the fuel humidity, particularly for active stack. At low humidity conditions, the active stack performance was decreased continuously and the cell voltage distribution was not uniform showing seriously low cell voltage at center cells mainly due to the cell drying. The passive stack showed relatively stable behavior at low humidity and the stack performance was largely dependent on the atmospheric conditions.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.37 no.5
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• pp.503-511
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• 2013

The humidifying supply gas is important in terms of the performance efficiency and membrane life improvement of a PEM fuel cell. A planar membrane humidifier is classified as a cross-flow and counter-flow type depending on the flow direction, and heat and mass transfer occur between the plate and the membrane. In this study, the changes in heat and mass transfer for various inlet temperatures and flow rates are compared according to the flow direction by using the sensible and latent ${\varepsilon}$-NTU method. The obtained results indicate that the counter flow shows higher heat and mass transfer performance than the cross flow at a low flow rate, and the difference in performance decreases as the flow rate increases. Furthermore, changes in the mass transfer performance decrease considerably with a nonlinear increase in the inlet temperature, and variations of the heat transfer performance are small.

• Membrane Journal
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.141-145
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• 2016

Polymer electrolyte membranes (PEMs) are key components to determine electrochemical fuel cell performances, in addition to electrode materials. The PEMs need to satisfy selective transport behaviors to small molecules including gases and protons; the PEMs have to transport protons as fast as possible, while they should act as hydrogen barriers, since the permeated gas induces the thermal degradation of cathode catalyst, resulting in rapid electrochemical reduction. To date, limited tools have been used to measure how fast hydrogen gas permeates through PEMs (e.g., Constant volume/variable Pressure (time-lag) method). However, most of the measurements are conducted under vacuum where PEMs are fully dried. Otherwise, the obtained hydrogen permeance is easily changeable, which causes the measurement errors to be large. In this study, hydrogen permeation properties through Nafion212 used as a standard PEM are evaluated using an in-situ measurement system in which both temperature and humidity are controlled at the same time.

• 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.