Performance Recovery after Contamination with Nitrogen Dioxide in a PEM Fuel Cell.

While the market for fuel cell vehicles is increasing, these vehicles will still coexist with combustion engine vehicles on the roads and will be exposed to an environment with significant amounts of contaminants that will decrease the durability of the fuel cell. To investigate different recovery methods, in this study, a PEM fuel cell was contaminated with 100 ppm of NO2 at the cathode side. The possibility to recover the cell performance was studied by using different airflow rates, different current densities, and by subjecting the cell to successive polarization curves. The results show that the successive polarization curves are the best choice for recovery; it took 35 min to reach full recovery of cell performance, compared to 4.5 h of recovery with pure air at 0.5 A cm-2 and 110 mL min-1. However, the performance recovery at a current density of 0.2 A cm-2 and air flow 275 mL min-1 was done in 66 min, which is also a possible alternative. Additionally, two operation techniques were suggested and compared during 7 h of operation: air recovery and air depletion. The air recovery technique was shown to be a better choice than the air depletion technique.

Fuel Cell Measurements with Cathode Catalysts of Sputtered Pt3 Y Thin Films.

Fuel cells are foreseen to have an important role in sustainable energy systems, provided that catalysts with higher activity and stability are developed. In this study, highly active sputtered thin films of platinum alloyed with yttrium (Pt3 Y) are deposited on commercial gas diffusion layers and their performance in a proton exchange membrane fuel cell is measured. After acid pretreatment, the alloy is found to have up to 2.5 times higher specific activity than pure platinum. The performance of Pt3 Y is much higher than that of pure Pt, even if all of the alloying element was leached out from parts of the thin metal film on the porous support. This indicates that an even higher performance is expected if the structure of the Pt3 Y catalyst or the support could be further improved. The results show that platinum alloyed with rare earth metals can be used as highly active cathode catalyst materials, and significantly reduce the amount of platinum needed, in real fuel cells.

Electrode kinetics of the NiO porous electrode for oxygen production in the molten carbonate electrolysis cell (MCEC).

The performance of a molten carbonate electrolysis cell (MCEC) is to a great extent determined by the anode, i.e. the oxygen production reaction at the porous NiO electrode. In this study, stationary polarization curves for the NiO electrode were measured under varying gas compositions and temperatures. The exchange current densities were calculated numerically from the slopes at low overpotential. Positive dependency on the exchange current density was found for the partial pressure of oxygen. When the temperature was increased in the range 600-650 °C, the reaction order of oxygen decreased from 0.97 to 0.80. However, there are two different cases for the partial pressure dependency of carbon dioxide within this temperature range: positive values, 0.09-0.30, for the reaction order at lower CO2 concentration, and negative values, -0.26-0.01, with increasing CO2 content. A comparison of theoretically obtained data indicates that the oxygen-producing reaction in MCEC could be reasonably satisfied by the reverse of oxygen reduction by the oxygen mechanism I, an n = 4 electron reaction, assuming a low coverage of oxide ions at high CO2 content and an intermediate coverage for a low CO2 concentration.

Methodology for measuring current distribution effects in electrochromic smart windows.

Electrochromic (EC) devices for use as smart windows have a large energy-saving potential when used in the construction and transport industries. When upscaling EC devices to window size, a well-known challenge is to design the EC device with a rapid and uniform switching between colored (charged) and bleached (discharged) states. A well-defined current distribution model, validated with experimental data, is a suitable tool for optimizing the electrical system design for rapid and uniform switching. This paper introduces a methodology, based on camera vision, for experimentally validating EC current distribution models. The key is the methodology's capability to both measure and simulate current distribution effects as transmittance distribution. This paper also includes simple models for coloring (charging) and bleaching (discharging), taking into account secondary current distribution with charge transfer resistance and ohmic effects. Some window-size model predictions are included to show the potential for using a validated EC current distribution model as a design tool.