• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.326-329
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• 2005

Proton exchange membrane (PEM) should be sufficiently hydrated with proper water management to maintain a good ionic conductivity and performance of a PEM fuel cell. However. cathode flooding resulting from excess water can impede the transport of reactants and hence deteriorate the fuel cell performance. For the PEM fuel cell to be commercially viable as vehicle or portable applications, the flooding on the cathode side should be minimized during the fuel cell operation. In this study, visualization technique was applied to understand the cathode flooding phenomena on the cathode side of a PEM fuel cell. To this end. a transparent PEM unit fuel cell wi th an act ive area of $25cm^2$ was designed and manufactured to allow for the visualization of cathode channel with performance characteristics. Two-phase flow resulting from the electro-chemical reaction of fuel cell was investigated experimentally. The images photographed by CCD camera with cell operating temperatures $(30\~50^{\circ}C)$ were presented. Results indicated that the flooding on the cathode side first occurs near the exit of cathode channel. As the operating temperature of fuel cell increases. it was found that liquid water droplets tend to evaporate easily and it can have an influence on lowering the flooding level. It is expected that this study can effectively contribute to the detailed researches on modeling water transport of an operating PEM fuel cell including two-phase flow phenomena.

• 한국전기화학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2001.06a
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• pp.185-185
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• 2001

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.858-861
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• 2006

In this paper, a study on the noise reduction in a mobile fuel cell system is presented. Among various fuel cell systems around 20W capacities designed for mobile electronic devices, the active direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) systems have been recently developed. In such systems, the primary noise source is the air pump which provides sufficient air flow ($5{\sim}6$ liter/min) for electrochemical reaction with methanol fuel while the noise contributions from other auxiliary parts are relatively small. Especially, the discrete noise tones generated by the air pump are dominant and those frequency peaks related to the rotor harmonics are needed to be suppressed by a silencer. Therefore. the Herschel/Quinke (HQ) tubes, which use the out-of-phase cancellation of acoustic waves propagating through direct and indirect pathways, are applied to the inlet of the air pump. Performance of noise reduction with HQ silencer is analytically estimated by calculating the transmission. The length and number of thin HQ tubes are optimized to decrease the radiated noise. As a result, the sound pressure level could be successfully reduced by about 10 dB after applying three serially connected HQ tubes.

• Design & Manufacturing
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.51-55
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• 2017

Micro fuel cells have high reliability and long usage time. Among them, PEMFC (polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cell) is suitable as a portable power source because it is easy to fix electrolyte and simple structure. The bipolar plate, a key component of the fuel cell, is produced by cutting. In the case of micro fuel cell separator, burr is very small and the flow channel size in the separator is very small. Therefore, it is difficult to remove burrs in the usual way such as a brushing or ultra-sonic method. Therefore, this study proposed electrolytic polishing process and analyzed the characteristics of each condition by introducing the concept of roughness reduction rate. In addition, the ultrasonic process was added to analyze the effect of ultrasonic addition.

• 한국전기화학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.07a
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• pp.103-110
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• 2005

Fuel cell systems are consisted of various parts, for example fuel cell stack, fuel supplier, electrical converters, controllers and so on. Each components of system should have appropriate specification for their applications as well as simplicity. Because thermal load can be managed simply by using fans without any water cooling system, the air-cooled PEMFC is widely used in sub kW and around 1kW systems. The performance of an air-cooled system is highly dependent on ambient temperature and humidity. In this paper, the air-cooled PEMFC systems are developed and investigated to study the operating characteristics in the aspect of the thermal and water coupled management by the control of the axial fans and compressors. Various experiments were also conducted to get the cell voltage distribution, the relative humidity of the reactant gas and the thermal management by axial cooling fans, which cannot be observed in single cell experiment. After then, as practical applications, portable fuel cell system and a hybrid electric cart were successfully integrated and operated by using this air-cooled stack.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.31-39
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• 2005

Direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) is considered as a candidate for portable power sources, that could overcome the disadvantages of lithium battery. But in order to attain commercial viability the long term stability of the DMFC should be achieved. Understanding the long-term behavior of membrane-electrode assembly (MEA) is a prerequisite to this purpose and the optimization of the MEA is also needed. In this study we have investigated the changes in performance and electrochemical properties of the MEA during extended operation and the effects of heat treatment of MEA on the long-term performance. The MEAs have been treated in an autoclave with saturated water vapor at 120$^{\circ}C$, vacuum oven at 140$^{\circ}C$ and boiling in organic solvents. The autoclaved MEA was found to be have the best long term performance. The on-off operation mode also increased the performance probably due to effective removal of products from the electrodes. Physical and electrochemical analyses using a scanning electron microscope, impedance analyser and half-cell technique have been done to characterize the MEAs.

• Journal of Electrochemical Science and Technology
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.38-50
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• 2023

Proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is a portable and clean power generation device. The structural arrangement of the flow field has a significant influence on the delivery efficiency of PEMFC. In this article, a new bionic flow channel is designed based on the inspiration of a spider shape. The branch channel width and branch corner are studied as the focus, and its simulation is carried out by the method of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The results show that when channel width/rib width and corner of the branch are 1.5 and 130° , respectively, it is the best numerical combination and the cell comprehensive performance is excellent. The final model using this numerical combination is compared with the traditional flow channel model to verify the advancement of this scheme.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.242-247
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• 2017

This study presents a bio-chemical energy harvesting system which can generate electric power from bioorganic substance contained in vermicompost. It produced electricity by inoculating microbial fuel cell(MFC) with earthworm-composted food waste. The generated electricity was converted into usable voltage level for mobile electronics through power conditioning circuits. The implemented prototype showed $200{\mu}W$ of maximum output electric power, which successfully supplied a beacon device which continuously transmitted data to nearby smartphone without a battery. The proposed system can help develop portable or bio-mimetic energy supply for sustainable use with further improvement.

• Journal of the Korean Ceramic Society
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2010

Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) have been under development for a variety of power generation applications. Power system sizes considered range from small watt-size units (e.g., 50-W portable devices) to very large multi-megawatt systems (e.g., 500-MW base load power plants). Because of the reversibility of its operation, the SOFC has also been developed to operate under reverse or electrolysis mode for hydrogen production from steam (In this case, the cell is referred to as solid oxide electrolysis cell or SOEC.). Potential applications for the SOEC include on-site and large-scale hydrogen production. One critical requirement for practical uses of these systems is long-term performance stability under specified operating conditions. Intrinsic material properties and operating environments can have significant effects on cell performance stability, thus performance degradation rate. This paper discusses potential applications of the SOFC/SOEC, technological status and current research and development (R&D) direction, and certain aspects of long-term performance degradation in the operation of SOFCs/SOECs for power generation/hydrogen production.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.350-355
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• 2005

소형 PEMFC(Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell)는 전기를 만들기 위해서 고순도의 수소를 필요로 한다. 각각의 마이크로 성형된 금속박판(스테인레스 스틸, 알루미늄)을 진공 브레이징법으로 접합하여 수소공급용 소형 개질기를 제작하였다. 마이크로 채널의 내부는 졸-겔법(스테인레스 스틸)과 양극산화법(알루미늄)으로 촉매를 지지하기 위한 다공성 $Al_2O_3$ 층을 형성시켰다. 스테인레스 스틸 박판은 에칭과 브레이징에 유리하였으나, 표면산화층 코팅을 균일하게 하여 안정적인 촉매반응을 유도하기 위한 균일한 표면 산화층 형성이 힘들었다. 반면 알루미늄 박판은 표면 산화층 형성이 상대적으로 용이했으며, 촉매를 상하지 않는 낮은 온도에서의 적층이 가능했다.