Investigation Of Membrane Electrode Assembled (MEA) And Experimental System Design In Unitized Regenerative Fuel Cell

The unitized regenerative fuel cell(URFC) is an advanced storage technology which use hydrogen as carrier. Cooperate with renewable energy, for example, wind and solar, URFC can achieve self-sufficient work. It is extremely hopeful to replace the traditional secondary battery energy storage system in weight limit situation, such as space, military and portable power field and so on.Membrane electrode assembly(MEA) and flow-field are major factors in performance of URFC. In this paper, compositions of PtIr catalysts, two flow-field patterns and operation temperature were studied. Influence of MEA and flow-field for URFC was estimated by round-trip conversion efficiency.Another research content is URFC lifetime research and experiment system design. The URFC unit cell lifetime researchs include continuous testing 100h and multiple cycling tests in WE mode. In the last, we put forward a experiment system design plan for 3kW URFC, including the basic parameters (e.g., Voltage, Current density, etc.) and experimental system process.When the current density was 0.25 A/cm~2, the proportion of Pt:Ir was 3:1, temperature was 60℃, flow-field was mixed, the URFC experiment result showed the highest efficiency 33%. In WE mode URFC unit cell run 100h continuously at 1.7 V, current density decayed less than 40%, and performances of serval cycling tests were similar. The results proved that the key materials, MEA structure, MEA manufacturing technology and URFC structure are feasible.