Fuel cell

Summary

A fuel cell is an electrochemical cell that converts the chemical energy of a fuel (often hydrogen) and an oxidizing agent (often oxygen) into electricity through a pair of redox reactions. Fuel cells are different from most batteries in requiring a continuous source of fuel and oxygen (usually from air) to sustain the chemical reaction, whereas in a battery the chemical energy usually comes from substances that are already present in the battery. Fuel cells can produce electricity continuously for as long as fuel and oxygen are supplied. The first fuel cells were invented by Sir William Grove in 1838. The first commercial use of fuel cells came almost a century later following the invention of the hydrogen–oxygen fuel cell by Francis Thomas Bacon in 1932. The alkaline fuel cell, also known as the Bacon fuel cell after its inventor, has been used in NASA space programs since the mid-1960s to generate power for satellites and space capsules. Since then, fuel cells have been used in

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell

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Diagnostic Measurements in Fuel Cells

Hélène Seiler

2010

Performance evolution and modeling of PEM fuel cell systems

Nicolas Roggo

In the context of climate change mitigation, different alternatives to reduce the atmospheric CO2 emissions are; increasing the efficiency, switching to renewable resource and reduce emissions from fossil resources by CO2 capture and storage (CCS) . Hydrogen is considered as potential alternative to cover the energy needs by using it as a fuel in internal combustion engines or fuel cells, or as chemical source. In proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells, also known as polymer exchange membrane fuel cells, pure hydrogen fuelis combined with the oxygen from the atmosphere to produce water, heat and electricity. Many research has been done in recent years on fuel cell systems leading to higher efficiencies. The performance is influenced by the membrane properties, the catalysts, the number of cells and the operating conditions. For studying the performance of fuel cell systems process modeling is a well-known approach. Here the evolution of fuel cell efficiency, especially of PEMFC is studied within the aim of updating previously developed PEMFC process models to integrate them with different hydrogen production processes using fossil and renewable resources in order to assess the competitiveness on the energy market.

2012

A model of a system including a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell and its fuel processing section has been developed. The goal was to investigate the process configurations to identify the optimal operating conditions and the optimal process structure of the system by applying modeling and process integration techniques. A simulation model using commercial chemical process simulation software (BELSIM-VALI) has been developed. The model includes a steam methane reforming (SMR), a water gas shift (WGS) and a preferential oxidation (PROX) for the fuel processing feeding a proton exchange membrane cell stack (PEM) and a post-combustion unit. The energy and the material flows obtained by simulation have been used to compute the process composite curves of the system. This has been used to identify the best heat exchange opportunities and to define the optimal operating conditions of the reforming system in order to provide the best overall efficiency considering the balance of plant. By improving the energy integration of the system and by using optimisation of operating conditions, the efficiency can be raised from 35% for the reference system to up 49% in the optimized design. This is obtained both by process configuration modifications and by optimizing operating set-points. The model developed has been used for sensitivity analysis and will serve as a basis for further process design including the optimal structure determination and the thermo-economic optimisation.

2002