Uno S., Nakaoki Y., Isezaki Y.
Ritsumeikan University, JP
Keywords: biofuel cell, modeling, simulation
Fuel cells have been drawing increasing attention due to their high efficiency and harmless gas emission. Hydrogen is the most widely used fuel, but its safe storage and transportation is one of the main issues. Alcohols and glucose have been demonstrated to be alternative fuels. Among those fuel cells, biofuel cells (BFC) exploit biochemical reactions in oxidizing such organic fuels. In fuel cell research and development, modeling and computer simulations are frequently used in design optimization and performance prediction. Although a number of simulation studies have been reported for hydrogen fuel cells, there are not many articles addressing BFC. Especially, there is no report on a fully analytic formula for cell output performance in spite of its handiness and usefulness. In this paper, we report on a fully analytic formula for enzymatic BFC performance (output voltage and power vs. current), along with a numerical simulation method. Both analytic and numerical results show excellent agreement with an experimental data taken from a glucose-fueled enzymatic BFC. With our analytic formula, impact of each parameter on the output characteristic is clearly exposed, and one can easily predict cell performance without any knowledge or skills on numerical simulation techniques.
Journal: TechConnect Briefs
Volume: 2, Nanotechnology 2014: MEMS, Fluidics, Bio Systems, Medical, Computational & Photonics
Published: June 15, 2014
Pages: 399 - 402
Industry sector: Advanced Materials & Manufacturing
Topic: Informatics, Modeling & Simulation
ISBN: 978-1-4822-5827-1