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Methanol crossover largely affects the efficiency of power generation in the direct methanol fuel cell. As the methanol crosses over through the membrane, the methanol oxidizes at the cathode, resulting in low fuel utilization and in a serious overpotential loss. In this study, the commercial membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) are investigated with different operating conditions such as membrane thickness, cell temperature, and methanol solution concentration. The effects of these parameters on methanol crossover and power density are studied. With the same membrane, increasing the cell temperature promotes the cell performance as expected, and the lower methanol concentration causes the concentration polarization effects, thus resulting in lower cell performance. Although higher methanol solution concentration can overcome the concentration polarization, a serious methanol crossover decreases the cell performance at high cell temperature. In this study, the open circuit voltage (OCV) is inversely proportional to methanol solution concentration, and is proportional to membrane thickness and cell temperature. Although increasing membrane thickness lowers the degree of methanol crossover, on the other hand, the ohmic resistance increases simultaneously. Therefore, the cell performance using Nafion 117 as membrane is lower than that of Nafion 112. In addition, the performance of the MEA made in our laboratory is higher than the commercial product, indicating the capability of manufacturing MEA is acceptable.

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The flow-field design of Direct Methanol Fuel Cells (DMFCs) is an important subject about the DMFCs performance. Flow-fields play an important role on ability to transport fuel and drive out the products (H2O, CO2). In general, most of fuel cells utilize the same structure of flow-field for both anode and cathode. The popular flow-fields used for DMFCs are parallel and grid designs. Nevertheless, the characteristics of reactants and products are entirely different in anode and cathode of DMFCs. Therefore; the influences of the flow-fields designs on the cell performance were investigated due to the same logic for catalyst used for cathode and anode differently. To get the better and more stable performance of DMFC, three flow-fields (Parallel, Grid and Serpentine) are utilized with different combination were studied in this research. As a consequence, by using parallel flow-field in anode side and serpentine flow -field in cathode, the most and highest power output was obtained.