Fuel cell 83 Laboratory equipment

Institute for Chemical Technology of the Technical University of Graz (hosting also the CD Laboratory for Fuel Cells). Here, development of advanced fuel cell electrodes is in progress. This Institute also makes and assembles fuel cell stacks and accessory equipment. Five prototype Apollo Fuel Cell have been produced. 

A different approach is to reconsider the airship as a means of air travel. A first approach to this is considering an airship for high-altitude cruising (or as a stratospheric platform) powered by photovoltaic panels and using a reversible fuel cell system to store surplus solar power and use it when the sim is not visible. In this way, carrying possibly heavy batteries may be avoided. The envisaged relative shares of direct use of solar power, of elec-trolyser operation and of fuel cell power production are shown in Fig. 4.12. So far, testing of the equipment sketched in Fig. 4.12 has been performed on a 1-kW scale in the laboratory and in simulated airship conditions. 

Preliminary work completed in this project includes laboratory and equipment setup and installation, and preliminary rounds of material optimization and process development. Full size bipolar plate prototypes have been produced with full double-sided flow patterns, demonstrating the potential of the manufacturing process. Process and material development has resulted in the characterization of material properties under a variety of composition levels. Material properties meeting or exceeding DOE targets have been measured, and bipolar plates, both machined and pattern-embossed, have been submitted to UTC Fuel Cells for in and out of cell testing. Phase I work will... 

In the laboratories of the agricultural equipment manufacturers Allis-Chalmers, a new version of fuel cell with immobilized alkaline electrolyte solution was developed. The company reequipped one of its tractors to electric traction with an electric motor powered by four batteries consisting of 252 alkaline fuel cells each. The traction was strong enough for a load of 3000 pounds. This tractor was a successful demonstration exhibited on different agricultural fairs in the United States. 

Life cycle assessment of SOFC technology is still uncommon due to the relatively early stage in technical development. However, several studies have been performed since the end of the 1990s. Since there is a lack of standard commercial equipment that could serve as a basis and reference point for analysis, LCA studies mostly refer to hypothetical concepts and/or extrapolate from laboratory and early market prototypes to commercial units. While the first studies had only little access to operation data at aU (for the fuel cell system itself but also for production processes), the main effort was set in the assessment of inventory data using assumptions, simplifications, and correlations [79, 80]. The main outcomes of these studies were the identification of weak points and the setting of benchmarks for further development. With more information about fuel cells available today and a simultaneous advancement in LCA methodology, the studies became more reliable and detailed, regarding system description [81] as well as the assessment of environmental impacts coimected with inputs and outputs [82]. Especially the extensive data of these two studies found their way to commercial databases for LCA [83] and thereby became available to LCA practitioners. In 2005, the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU)... 

Work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (California Institute of Technology) and University of South California, Los Angeles, demonstrated for the first time the power output capability of a DMFC equipped with PEM [52]. From fliis work. Figure 4.2(a) shows flic improved polarization performance of flic PtRu/C anode with Nafion 117 electrolyte compared to 0.5 M H2SO4, whilst Figure 4.2(b) exemplifies the fuel cell performance with the catalyst coated membrane. 

Clearly, electrical conductivity both in-plane and through-plane is one of the most important properties of the bipolar plate. Despite most fuel cell (component) laboratories have access to electrical conductivity testing equipment, by now there is no standardized test method for... 

The first laboratory models of MCFCs built in the 1960s were in the best case operative for only a few months. At present, intense research and engineering efforts have made it possible to build individual units that have worked several hundreds and thousands of hours (Bischoff et al., 2002). Yet the road to a guaranteed five-year period of operation is still long. Many causes lead to a gradual decline in the performance of such power plants, or even premature failure. The three most important reasons associated with the fuel cells themselves (rather than with extraneous issues rooted in ancillary equipment or operating errors) are described below. 

An irradiation test of KAERl s pilot TRISO particle fuel was started on October 5, 2013, and completed on March 31, 2014 (Kim et al., 2014). The average power of the fuel was evaluated to be 610 W, and the average bumup was calculated to be about 37,000 MWd/MTU. Nondestmctive PlEs of the test fuel were completed, and the destmctive tests are currently being carried out at KAERI s irradiated material examination facility. Simulated heat-up test equipment to perform a simulated heating test in a laboratory is under construction. It is expected to provide fundamental data for the constmction of the actual heat-up test equipment for use in a hot cell. 

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