Experimental Investigation of Effect of Flow Bed Design on Performance of Liquid Feed Direct Methanol Fuel Cells

Abstract

Abstract The effect of flow bed design on the performance of a liquid feed direct methanol fuel cell was studied experimentally. The flow beds were designed and manufactured with different channel densities, channel depths, and ridge widths. The flow beds were machined on stainless steel polar plates. The experimental results showed that ridge width affects the slope of the ohmic polarization curve. A ridge width of 3.30 mm provided the highest peak power. When the contact surface area between the flow bed and electrode was constant, the effect of channel density on cell performance was minimal, under the experimental conditions of this paper. The channel depth had a considerable influence on cell performance with a 2 mm deep channel achieving the best performance. The mechanism of the experimental phenomena was analyzed in this paper.