Effects of Different Membranes on the Performance of PEM Fuel Cell

Abstract

Nowadays, air pollution prevails as one of the major problems all over the world. Fuel cell is the recently developed technology to counteract air pollution. Fuel cells are electrochemical devices that produce electricity by the reaction of two gases such as hydrogen and oxygen. Proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell is the most economical one. The advantage of using PEM fuel cell is that they can operate at low temperature of about 50 ℃ to 80 ℃, and there is no emission of harmful gases to the atmosphere, thereby maintaining eco-friendly environment. The performance of the fuel cell is mainly influenced by various factors like material properties of components (like gas diffusion layer, membrane, catalyst layer), flow channel designs, operating conditions and water management. The main function of membrane which is made of polytetrafluoroethylene is to allow only the protons from anode to cathode and not allows electrons. So the membrane is called as PEM. The performance of the fuel cell is affected by different types of membranes. In this paper, the performance of PEM fuel cell with two different membranes such as Nafion 117 and Nafion 212 is analyzed. The serpentine flow field is chosen on both cathode and anode sides. The PEM fuel cell having active area of 11.6 cm2 is designed and analyzed with best-operating conditions. The results show that the PEM fuel cell with Nafion 212 membrane generates more power.