Investigation of the characteristics of a stacked direct borohydride fuel cell for portable applications

To investigate the possibility of the portable application of a direct borohydride fuel cell (DBFC), weight reduction of the stack and high stacking of the cells are investigated for practical running conditions. For weight reduction, carbon graphite is adopted as the bipolar plate material even tho...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of power sources 2008-05, Vol.180 (1), p.114-121
Main Authors: Kim, Cheolhwan, Kim, Kyu-Jung, Ha, Man Yeong
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied sciences
Carbon
Carbon graphite
Channels
Design engineering
Direct borohydride fuel cell
Energy
Energy. Thermal use of fuels
Equipments for energy generation and conversion: thermal, electrical, mechanical energy, etc
Exact sciences and technology
Fuel cells
Fuels
Hydrogen generation
Maldistribution
Stacked cell
Stacking
Stacks
Two-phase flow
Weight reduction
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:To investigate the possibility of the portable application of a direct borohydride fuel cell (DBFC), weight reduction of the stack and high stacking of the cells are investigated for practical running conditions. For weight reduction, carbon graphite is adopted as the bipolar plate material even though it has disadvantages in tight stacking, which results in stacking loss from insufficient material strength. For high stacking, it is essential to have a uniform fuel distribution among cells and channels to maintain equal electric load on each cell. In particular, the design of the anode channel is important because active hydrogen generation causes non-uniformity in the fuel flow-field of the cells and channels. To reduce the disadvantages of stacking force margin and fuel maldistribution, an O-ring type-sealing system with an internal manifold and a parallel anode channel design is adopted, and the characteristics of a single and a five-cell fuel cell stack are analyzed. By adopting carbon graphite, the stack weight can be reduced by 4.2 times with 12% of performance degradation from the insufficient stacking force. When cells are stacked, the performance exceeds the single-cell performance because of the stack temperature increase from the reduction of the radiation area from the narrow stacking of cells.
ISSN:0378-7753
1873-2755
DOI:10.1016/j.jpowsour.2008.01.082