Air-Breathing Laminar Flow-Based Microfluidic Fuel Cell

Jayashree, Ranga S.; Gancs, Lajos; Choban, Eric R.; Primak, Alex; Natarajan, Dilip; Markoski, Larry J.; Kenis, Paul J. A.

doi:10.1021/ja054599k

Cited by 339 publications

(261 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…The typical open-circuit voltage of an air-breathing LFFC with similar fuel and electrolyte is in the range of 0.7 V to 0.9 V [5]. Since the microfluidic fuel cell takes the advantage of co-laminar streams, changes in flow rate will affect the molecular diffusion and consequently the cell performance.…”

Section: Concentration Distribution Of Formic Acidmentioning

confidence: 99%

An air-breathing microfluidic formic acid fuel cell with a porous planar anode: experimental and numerical investigations

Shaegh¹,

Nguyen²,

Chan³

2010

J. Micromech. Microeng.

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Abstract. This paper reports the fabrication, characterization and numerical simulation of an air-breathing membraneless laminar flow-based fuel cell (LFFC) with carbon-fiber-based paper as anode. The fuel cell uses 1 M formic acid as the fuel. Parameters from experimental results were used to establish a three-dimensional numerical model with COMSOL Multiphysics. The simulation predicts the mass transport and electrochemical reactions of the tested fuel cell using the same geometry and operating conditions. Simulation results predict that the oxygen concentration over air-breathing cathode is almost constant for different flow rates of fuel and electrolyte. In contrast, growth of depletion boundary layer of fuel over anode can be the major reason for low current density and low fuel utilization. At a low flow rate of 10 µl/min, simulation results show a severe fuel diffusion to the cathode side, which is the main reason for the degradation of open-circuit potential from 0.78 V at 500 µl/min to 0.58 V at 10 µl/min as observed in experiments. Decreasing the total flow rate fifty times from 500 µl/min to 10 µl/min only reduces the maximum power density approximately two times from 7.9 mW/cm 2 to 3.9 mW/cm 2 , while fuel utilization increases from 1.03% to 38.9% indicating a higher fuel utilization at low flow rates. Numerical simulation can be used for further optimization, to find a compromise between power density and fuel utilization.

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Section: Concentration Distribution Of Formic Acidmentioning

confidence: 99%

An air-breathing microfluidic formic acid fuel cell with a porous planar anode: experimental and numerical investigations

Shaegh¹,

Nguyen²,

Chan³

2010

J. Micromech. Microeng.

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“…As a result, the water management is not needed [3]. Furthermore, the structures of membraneless micro fuel cells are very simple 2 International Journal of Electrochemistry and easy to miniaturize [4], so that light and stackable fuel cells can be fabricated with simple microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) [5,6]. The flexibility and the performance implications of operating membraneless sodium perborate fuel cell (MLSPBFC) under "acid-alkaline media, " that is, one electrode is acidic and the other one is alkaline condition, will be the focus of this study.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of Membraneless Sodium Perborate Fuel Cell for Media Flexible Power Generation

Ponmani

Durga

Arun

et al. 2014

International Journal of Electrochemistry

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This paper reports the media flexibility of membraneless sodium perborate fuel cell (MLSPBFC) using acid/alkaline bipolar electrolyte in which the anode is in acidic media while the cathode is in alkaline media, or vice versa. Investigation of the cell operation is conducted by using formic acid as a fuel and sodium perborate as an oxidant for the first time under "acid-alkaline media" configurations. The MLSPBFC architecture enables interchangeable operation with different media combinations. The experimental results indicate that operating under "acid-alkaline media" conditions significantly improves the fuel cell performance compared with all-acidic and all-alkaline conditions. The effects of flow rates and the concentrations of various species at both the anode and cathode on the cell performance are also investigated. It has been demonstrated that the laminar flow based microfluidic membraneless fuel cell can reach a maximum power density of 28.2 mW cm −2 with a fuel mixture flow rate of 0.3 mL min −1 at room temperature.

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“…Although the enhancement of single M 2 FC performance is not within the scope of this study, it is noted that many single cell studies have reported M 2 FC performance ten-fold that of the 21 present study through employing certain combinations of fuel/oxidant, advanced catalysts or cell designs [13,15,52].…”

Section: The Effect Of the Number Of Cells In Seriesmentioning

confidence: 78%

Development and characteristics of a membraneless microfluidic fuel cell array

Wang

Leung

et al. 2014

Electrochimica Acta

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Membraneless microfluidic fuel cells (M 2 FCs) are promising portable power sources, but they suffer from limited scalability. This paper presents a scaling-out strategy for general M 2 FC applications with their characteristics studied by both experiments and mathematical modeling. The present strategy addresses the issues of flow distribution non-uniformity and shunt current losses by integrating a well-designed fluid circuit. With the present strategy, parallel and series connections of four cells in an array results in a scaling-out efficiency of 93% and 82%, respectively. The effects of different parameters on the array performance as well as further device scalability are also investigated in this paper. Preferable conditions for 2 the array operation include a high branch ionic resistance, small unit cell difference and high unit-cell performance, which can be achieved by appropriately designing the branch geometry, employing high-precision fabrication / assembly techniques and improving the single-cell materials / chemistries. It is expected that the present array can be incremented to 50 cells or above in series with over 75% efficiency as long as there is sufficiently high branch resistance or cell performance.

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Air-Breathing Laminar Flow-Based Microfluidic Fuel Cell

Cited by 339 publications

References 14 publications

An air-breathing microfluidic formic acid fuel cell with a porous planar anode: experimental and numerical investigations

An air-breathing microfluidic formic acid fuel cell with a porous planar anode: experimental and numerical investigations

Development of Membraneless Sodium Perborate Fuel Cell for Media Flexible Power Generation

Development and characteristics of a membraneless microfluidic fuel cell array

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