Experimental investigations on the effect of current collector open ratio on the performance of a passive direct methanol fuel cell with liquid electrolyte layer

This paper aims to present the influence of anode catalyst supports, current collector open ratio, liquid electrolyte layer incorporated membrane, and methanol concentration on the passive Direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) performance. Current collectors with three different opening ratios of 45.40%, 55.40% and 63.05% were considered in the present study. For the three current collectors, the fuel cell is operated with diluted methanol solution (concentration varied from 1 to 5 M) as the anodic fuel. The experimental results showed that the current collector with 55.40% open ratio at 3 M of methanol concentration produced the MPD compared to the other two open ratios. A liquid electrolyte (LE) layer was inserted in between the two half MEAs to recuce the methanol crossover. It was noticed that the LE-DMFC gave the best performance with all the three current collector having different opne ratios. Similarly, the effect of two anaode catalyst layers was also studied. From the experimental results, it was noticed that the fuel cell performance improved by using the MEA with two layers of anode catalyst of Pt-Ru/Carbon black + Pt-Ru/C.

Automated summary

The study found that the current collector with a 55.40% open ratio performed the best at 3M methanol concentration, and the performance was improved by using a liquid electrolyte layer with all three current collectors. Furthermore, utilizing two layers of anode catalyst can enhance the fuel cell performance.