Abstract:
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With increasing use of renewable energies, such as photovoltaic, wind, biomass, thermosolar,
geologic, appeared the challenge of the storage. If it is talking about the mobile devises,
it is easy to see that it is necessary store this energy to use it later. In the case of the
vehicles the need is obvious to change the oil engine to electric engine, but this happens in
all mobile devices. The polymer electrolyte fuel cells (PEFC) convert hydrogen and oxygen
to electricity. The energy is store as hydrogen gas and the waste is water. Nowadays, there
are lots of companies studying the viability of these systems. The future of these batteries
pass through the good relation between the performance and the price. A signi cant fraction
of the PEMFC cost is focused on the electrodes, exactly in the catalyst used. This catalyst
is platinum and it has an important cost comparative with the other parts of the fuel cell
[1].
The present thesis studies the e ect of Pt loading in the electrode of proton exchange
membrane hydrogen fuel cells (PEMFCs). Gasteiger, Panels and Yan study showed that
the anode Pt loading doesn't signi cantly a ect the performance of hydrogen fuel cells [2].
However, in the present study di erent experiments with catalyst-coated membranes (CCM)1
corroborated what it was known before about the cathode loading. But in the case of
the anode loading, it was proved that there is an optimum loading which gives the best
performance. This results will reduce the costs of the PEMFC at least in the anode side. |