New Fuel Cell Stack Techology
A new design for fuel cells could make them fault tolerant and resilient to adverse environmental and internal influences.A team from Imperial College London is developing the technology through a project sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Current fuel cells are designed with electrodes connected in a series. The weakest link in the cell dictates performance and reliability. Imperial College chemist Anthony Kucernak and his team will redesign fuel-cell stacks so they can switch out bad units and allow the cell to continue operation. 'We will do it with a series parallel geometry,' he said. 'The stack will look like a normal stack but the electrodes will be in parallel with one another. 'While electrodes in a current fuel-cell stack are integrated with one expensive insulated gate bipolar transistor, the Imperial team proposes integrating less expensive multiple field-effect transistors with each and every electrode in the sta...