Nonconventional Design Principles for Fuel Cells

The first edition of this book was published in December 2008. This second edition is updated with information published after this date up to October 2011. Two chapters of the first edition were rewritten Chapter 15 (modeling of fuel cells) and Chapter 14—now Chapter 17 (small fuel cells for portable devices). In this edition three new chapters of high current interest are also included Chapter 14 (structural and wetting properties of fuel cell components). Chapter 16 (experimental methods for fuel cell stacks), and Chapter 18 (nonconventional design principles for fuel cells). 

Since both mini-fuel cells and vehicle-size fuel cells are intended for a very large contingent of consumers, they must be suited for large-scale production so as to be available at reasonable low prices. For different reasons, present conventional fuel cell batteries, described in previous chapters, have not been able to satisfy all these requirements, and new approaches in designing fuel cells were needed. Such approaches were described in two chapters Chapter 17, on new designs for mini-fuel cell batteries, and Chapter 18, on entirely new, nonconventional design principles which can be applied to cells of any size, not only to small ones. 

The importance of solving these problems increased during the last decade with the rising necessity to develop small fuel cell plants for portable devices and for electric vehicles, for which a reliable simplified and low-cost design is necessary (see Chapter 17). To circumvent these problems, numerous efforts have been made to use other, nonconventional principles in fuel ceU design. 

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