Study on proton exchange membrane fuel cells performance design: A case study of a small surface boat

Abstract

The requirements for green energy have become more critical with the increasing risk from the global warming effect. In this study, previous study results were applied to obtain an optimal small surface boat configuration design and estimated its power requirement. The Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFC) are wildly used on vehicles. Its high working temperature (80 °C) make it a safer power source for small surface boat. This research used PEMFC as the test platform with test range from 0 to 2.4 kW. In order to obtain the optimum performance, Taguchi’s orthogonal array (L8 and L27) method was applied, with three factors: flow rate of hydrogen, humidification conditions, and temperature of the fuel cell stack, as the control parameters. According to the case study results, a dimensionless analysis were performed to acquire the ship model’s resistance–power curve and to evaluate the required power for a real ship (with a size that is three times that of the ship model). The speed was approximately 5 knots, and the required power was about 250 W. Finally, the best factor-level combination of Taguchi’s method is A2B3C2 and that the SNR is 57.81 dB. This is better than the value (approximately 0.43 dB) for the original design (A1B1C1). In addition, both the main effect and interaction of the three factors have significant influence, especially toward the fuel cell stack temperature. The robust design was obtained with the intelligence parameter method matching with the results of the Taguchi’s optimal prediction.