Grove, Sir William Robert

Ever since Volta s first battery in 1800, scientists have been trying to develop bigger and better electrochemical cells. Sir William Robert Grove (1811-96), a lawyer from Wales who had a penchant for experimental science, discovered an interesting cell in 1838. He placed one end of a... 

Welsh lawyer Sir William Robert Grove (1811-96) invents a hydrogen fuel cell. 

Sir William Robert Grove experimented with the first fuel cell, using... 

In principle, fuel cells can be considered as batteries that convert chemical energy to electricity without combustion, but instead through electrochemical reactions. The difference between fuel cells and conventional batteries is that fuel cells can run continuously as long as fuels are available for electrochemical reactions, whereas a battery needs to be recharged periodically. The concept of fuel cells was conceived by Sir William Robert Grove, known as the father of the fuel cell, who developed a... 

In 1839, Sir William Robert Grove, a British lawyer and physicist, built the first fuel cell. More than 100 years later, fuel cells finally found a practical application—in space exploration. During short space missions, batteries can provide enough energy to keep the astronauts warm and to run electrical systems. But longer missions need energy for much longer periods of time, and fuel cells are better suited for this than batteries are. Today, fuel cells are critical to the space shuttle missions and to future missions on the international space station. 

Fig. 2.3 Sir William Robert Grove demonstrated inl839 the first fuel cell with four galvanic elements in series. Diluted sufu-ric acid was used as the electrolyte and platinum wires as the electrodes. In the...

Fuel cells. The British scientist Sir William Robert Grove (1839) discovered the principle on which fuel cells are based. Grove observed that after switching off the current that he had used to electrolyze water, a current... 

Nitric acid battery (Sir William Robert Grove) The Grove cell delivered twice the voltage of its more expensive rival, the Daniell cell. 

Fuel cells themselves were invented over 170 years ago, with the first fuel ceU demonstrated by Sir William Robert Grove in 1839. The first commercial use of a PEM fuel cell in a system occurred when General Electric developed the technology with NASA and McDonnell Aircraft for use in the Gemini space program. Since then, fuel cells have been integrated into systems intended for a wide variety of applications, from fuel cells of just a few watts for portable appUcatiOTi, to hundreds of kilowatts for applications in transportation. 

Although fuel cells are considered a modern, leading edge technology. Sir William Robert Grove first demonstrated them in the nineteenth century [9]. Grove built what he called a gas battery in 1839, a device that combined... 

History The working principal of the fuel cell is known since the 19th century in 1839 the physicist Sir William Robert Grove discovered the reversibUity of the electrolysis of water at a platinum wire surface (Fig. 5.26). 

In the 1830s the British chemist Sir William Robert Grove (1811-1896), a trained lawyer and judge and an amateur natural scientist, conducted a series of experiments on water electrolysis. His device consisted of two platinum electrodes dipping into water acidified with sulfuric acid (Figure 2.1). ... 

It was seemingly this work that urged Welsh-born Sir William Robert Grove, who resided in London as a barrister and physical scientist, to verify this effect in his home laboratory (Bossel, 2000). Grove checked the effect, and the potential was there. The schematic of a later experiment of Grove with several fuel cells connected in series is shown in his famous drawing (Figure I. lb). 

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