Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HYDROGEN ENERGY
Volume 37, Issue 11, Pages 9359-9367Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhydene.2012.02.155
Keywords
Fuel cell; Microfluidic fuel cell; Membraneless; Laminar flow; LFFC; Current collector
Categories
Funding
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada
- 4D LABS at Simon Fraser University
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Microfluidic fuel cells are an attractive candidate for low-power applications and provide a unique advantage over traditional fuel cells by elimination of the membrane. More importantly, microfluidic fuel cells enable a simple single-layer structure similar to common lab-on-chip devices, which makes conventional microfabrication or micromachining techniques readily applicable. Microfabrication is a preferable fabrication tool for microscale devices due to the benefits of high precision and repeatability at relatively low cost. However, the performance of most microfluidic fuel cells reported to date was negatively influenced by intrinsic contact resistances arising due to the highly porous nature of the electrodes. In the present work, a chip-embedded thin film current collector for vanadium fueled microfluidic fuel cells is proposed, fabricated, and evaluated as a potential mitigation strategy. The micromachining based thin film process is compatible with the overall cell fabrication, comprising photolithography and soft lithography, and does not require a substantial modification of the original cell design. Cells with and without current collectors are directly compared experimentally: the cell with current collectors demonstrates a 79% increase in peak power density, indicating that the contact resistance is significantly reduced by this approach. A volume specific peak power density of 6.2W cm(-3) is achieved, which is significantly higher than for previously reported microfluidic fuel cells. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) analysis is carried out to measure the combined ohmic cell resistance and confirmed a 32% reduction using the current collectors, which shows a good agreement with slope decrements in the polarization curves. Copyright (C) 2012, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available