Carbon Based Electrodes for Upscaling Microfluidic Fuel Cells

Abstract

In this work, we present an experimental microfluidic fuel cell with a novel up-scaled porous electrode architecture that provides higher overall power output compared to conventional microfluidic fuel cells and a methodology for electrode material evaluation to inform designs for improved performance. Our proof-of-concept architecture is an up-scaled version of a previously presented flow-through cell with more than nine times the active electrode surface area. We employed 0.04M formic acid and 0.01M potassium permanganate as fuel and oxidant, respectively, dissolved in a 1M sulfuric acid electrolyte. Platinum black was employed as the catalyst for both anode and cathode. Carbon based porous electrodes including felt, cloth, fibre, and foam were compared to traditional Toray carbon paper in order to characterize their respective performances. We also discussed current densities normalized by electrode volume, which is appropriate for comparison of flow-through architectures. The traditional method of current normalization by projected electrode surface area is also presented.

Key findings

• ▸Carbon-based porous electrodes outperformed traditional Toray carbon paper in terms of power output.
• ▸The up-scaled porous electrode architecture provided more than nine times the active electrode surface area compared to a previously presented flow-through cell.
• ▸Current densities normalized by electrode volume were used to compare the performance of different electrode materials.

Keywords

Identifiers

DOI

10.1115/fuelcell2012-91043

Journal

ASME 2012 10th International Conference on Fuel Cell Science, Engineering and Technology

Year

2012