Abstract
Hydrogen gas is considered as a good candidate fuel for the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) due to its convenience in the system design and its high efficiency of energy transfer. Besides, pure hydrogen can prevent the platinum catalyst from poisoning by carbon monoxide below 1000C. In this study, a homemade copper hydrogen storage tube using a commercial metal hydride Hsu-Yang T1 was used as the fuel to study the hydrogen transfer efficiency in the PEMFC. A new cell setup using Ni foam as the gas flow channel was also designed to study the cell performance.The P-C-T curves were established and were used to provide basic properties of the metal hydrides. Meanwhile, a fuel cell test station and several single cell setups were fabricated to study the optimum operation condition of the fuel cells. The characteristics of the fuel cell were correlated with the results of AC impedance and cyclic voltammetry. Hydrogen storage tube was installed to the fuel cell test system to study the hydrogen transfer efficiency at different hydrogen flow rates.It was found that the E-TEK electrode had higher cell performance than the Toray electrode, and the E-TEK electrode had better discharge performance at 800C than other lower temperatures. A high hydrogen transfer efficiency but unstable currents were obtained. Stable currents but lower hydrogen transfer efficiency could be observed at 600C. With Ni foam replacing for the graphite gas flow channel, the discharge performance was slightly inferior to that of the traditional design. The cell performance was enhanced when the cathode areas were increased presumably due to the increased reaction cross-section of oxygen and the protons.