Manipulating Water in High-Performance Hydroxide Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells through Asymmetric Humidification and Wetproofing

Journal Article · Wed Feb 18 00:00:00 EST 2015 · Journal of the Electrochemical Society

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1149/2.0131506jes· OSTI ID:1211484

Kaspar, RB; Letterio, MP; Wittkopf, JA; Gong, K; Gu, S; Yan, YS

Hydroxide exchange membrane fuel cells (HEMFCs) are an emerging low-cost alternative to conventional proton exchange membrane fuel cells. In addition to producing water at the anode, HEMFCs consume water at the cathode, leading to distinctive water transport behavior. We report that gas diffusion layer (GDL) wetproofing strictly lowers cell performance, but that the penalty is much higher when the anode side is wetproofed compared to the cathode side. We attribute this penalty primarily to mass transport losses from anode flooding, suggesting that cathode humidification may be more beneficial than anode humidification for this device. GDLs with little or no wetproofing perform best, yielding a competitive peak power density of 737 mW cm(-2). (C) The Author(s) 2015. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, hup://creativecommons.orgilicenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. All rights reserved.

• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E)
• DOE Contract Number: DE-AR0000009
• OSTI ID: 1211484
• Journal Information: Journal of the Electrochemical Society, Vol. 162, Issue 6; ISSN 0013-4651
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English