Selection of Fuel/Air feeders in BOP system for a DMFC

직접메탄올 연료전지 BOP 시스템에서 연료/공기 공급 장치의 선정

The objective of this study is to select fuel/air feeders for reliable operation of BOP(Balance of Plant) system for a DMFC (direct methanol fuel cell). A 42-cell 50W DMFC stack is considered for performance comparison of selected fuel pumps and air blowers. The present stack has two serpentine anode channels with depth of 1.2 mm and rib of 1 mm and one serpentine cathode channel with depth of 1.5 mm and rib of 1 mm. The pressure drop through the stack is estimated in advance by utilizing the pre-existing loss coefficients data for various flow configurations. Then the operating points of feeders are determined at the balance point of the flow impedance curves for the channels in the DMFC stack and the selected pump and blower performance curves. After estimating the operating flow rates in the anode and cathode channels, the flow measurement with the selected feeders is performed for the comparison with the estimated flow rates. The measured results show that the discrepancy between the estimation and the measurement for the cathode is about 26%, about 3% for the anode