Abstract
In the context of global warming, clean energy represented by fuel cells has ushered in a window period of rapid development; however, most research mainly focuses on the improvement of catalysts and performance, and there is very little research on the performance differences and energy consumption between different oxidants. In this paper, the performance differences of fuel cells with different oxidants (air and oxygen) are studied using a self-made CCM, and the economic aspect is calculated from the perspective of power improvement and energy consumption. Firstly, the CCM and GDL are prepared, and the hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity of GDL are realized by the addition of PTFE and SiO2, respectively. Secondly, through the experiment, it is found that the fuel cell can achieve the best comprehensive performance at 60 °C, and the use of oxygen can achieve the highest power increase, 117.1%, compared with air. Finally, from the perspective of economics, after excluding the power consumed for preparing oxygen, the use of oxygen as an oxidant still achieved a net power increase of 29.512%. The research in this paper clearly shows that using oxygen instead of air can greatly improve performance and is good economically, which makes it a useful exploration for the research of fuel cells.
Highlights
As a very promising new energy research field, proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) have great advantages in energy conversion efficiency and environmental protection
The catalyst is sprayed on the transfer substrate, and the catalyst layer is transferred on both sides of the Membrane electrode assembly (MEA) through hot pressing process, and the amount of catalyst of PEMFC used in this article is 0.35 mg/cm2
This paper used three conditions of 50 ◦C, 60 ◦C and 70 ◦C to test the performance of the PEMFC
Summary
As a very promising new energy research field, proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) have great advantages in energy conversion efficiency and environmental protection. Given the background of global energy conservation and emission reduction, “carbon peak” and “carbon neutralization”, countries all over the world have invested many human and material resources to study fuel cells. The increasingly mature fuel cell technology will be gradually applied to the fields of transportation and distributed generation, and will gradually become the best solution in the field of new energy. The cost-effective redox flow batteries proposed by NASA in the 1970s are a promising research direction [1,2]. Due to the problems of high initial investment and low energy density, it is necessary to continue to study this technology to improve its commercial application value. The research on PEMFC mainly focuses on performance improvement, power system design and materials economics [3–8], and less on oxidants
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