Abstract
Hydrogen could be produced from any substance containing hydrogen atoms, such as water, hydrocarbon (HC) fuels, acids or bases. Hydrocarbon fuels couold be converted to hydrogen-rich gas through reforming process for hydrogen production. Even though fuel cell have high efficiency with pure hydrogen from gas tank, it is more beneficial to generate hydrogen from city gas (mainly methane) in residential application such as domestic or office environments. Thus hydrogen is generated by reforming process using hydrocarbon. Unfortunately, the reforming process for hydrogen production is accompanied with unavoidable impurities. Impurities such as CO, $CO_2$, $H_2S$, $NH_3$, and $CH_4$ in hydrogen could cause negative effects on fuel cell performance. Those effects are kinetic losses due to poisoning of electrode catalysts, ohmic losses due to proton conductivity reduction including membrane and catalyst ionomer layers, and mass transport losses due to degrading catalyst layer structure and hydrophobic property. Hydrogen produced from reformer eventually contains around 73% of $H_2$, 20% or less of $CO_2$, 5.8% of less of $N_2$, or 2% less of $CH_4$, and 10ppm or less of CO. Most impurities are removed using pressure swing adsorption (PSA) process to get high purity hydrogen. However, high purity hydrogen production requires high operation cost of reforming process. The effect of carbon dioxide on fuel cell performance was investigated in this experiment. The performance of PEM fuel cell was investigated using current vs. potential experiment, long run (10 hr) test, and electrochemical impedance measurement when the concentrations of carbon dioxide were 10%, 20% and 30%. Also, the concentration of impurity supplied to the fuel cell was verified by gas chromatography (GC).
