A 3kW water-cooled Proton Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) thermal performance analysis / Shahir Sabtu

Fuel cells are static energy conversion devices that can generate electricity by using the combustion of hydrogen. Experimental works on one of the type of fuel cell which is a 3 kW water-cooled Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) was conducted at the Fuel Cell Lab of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of University of Technology Mara (UiTM). The main objective of the project is based on the thermal performance analysis of the PEMFC. Variable input parameters to the reactants are needed to allow the comparative performance study to be conducted. Therefore, in order to determine all the important parameters, a series of experiment have to be carried out. There are several measuring instruments used during the experiment which are two MIDI loggers, a thermal camera, a clamp meter, a multimeter, a stopwatch and several meters of thermocouple probes (K-type). The main purpose of this experiment is to obtain the temperature distributions of PEMFC. The data will be used for the calculation of heat content of the stack, rate of heat transfer of cooling water, the rate of heat transfer of air, heat generation of the stack and the efficiency of the fuel cell. In general, the results showed that the efficiency of the fuel cell,i]ceii ranges approximately between 40% to 75%. Other than that, active cooling by air was approximately between the ranges of 83% to 99% which was quite high. Based on the results obtained, the fuel cell can be improved by doing continuously improvement on the cooling system which can contribute more to the higher fuel cell efficiency.