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Thursday, October 30, 2008: 8:30 AM
101A-C
Five Step R&D Roadmap for DMFC Reference Design Power Supply for Notebook Computers
PolyFuel recognized some time ago that despite the best efforts of many organizations ranging from leading consumer electronics companies to specialized start ups, commercialization of portable fuel cell technology was proving to be difficult for consumer electronic applications like notebook computers. In particular, reducing the size of the fuel cell systems to the point where they could beat the incumbent Lithium-ion battery technology is very challenging. In response, PolyFuel put together an aggressive internal program as part of its strategy of providing Engineering Support Services to its membrane customers. Under the program, PolyFuel is working not only on the membrane challenges, the Company’s area of proven expertise, but also on solving the system-level problems, such as water management, fuel delivery, packaging, notebook integration, and so forth. PolyFuel sought and received a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to support and expedite the program.
In early 2008, PolyFuel announced it had fundamentally solved the water management problem that has plagued portable fuel cell developers for nearly a decade. All fuel cells create water as a byproduct of the electricity generation process. In a direct methanol fuel cell, water is also an anode reactant so it is highly desirable to efficiently reuse the product water.
For this achievement, PolyFuel engineered an entirely new membrane, a breakthrough “membrane electrode assembly” (MEA) design, and a new system design that not only reduces the amount of water byproduct produced during fuel cell operation, but recycles a significant portion of that water directly back through the membrane to anode, where it is reused to generate more electricity. The new membrane and MEA allows the water to be kept in perfect balance throughout the system across a wide range of operating conditions. The result is a considerable simplification in the design of the fuel cell system, eliminating components, reducing overall size and weight, lowering cost and improving robustness. These are significant, as the primary difficulty with fuel cells has been to make them small enough to be able to be integrated into a notebook PC.
PolyFuel has now met the first four of the five milestones in this program. These include; (i) developing a conceptual design (with counterintuitive and novel approaches) for a complete fuel cell system that can outperform Lithium-ion batteries, (ii) engineer a new membrane that has a high level of water permeability but a low level of methanol diffusivity – usually mutually-exclusive attributes, (iii) designing an MEA that can recycle much of the water that is created in the fuel cell back to and through the newly engineered membrane, (iv) demonstrating the “proof of concept” by operating several single cells incorporating the newly-engineered membrane and MEA in perfect water balance using the conceptual system design target operating conditions.
With these results, PolyFuel has further progressed toward the fifth and final milestone in this program which is to create a reference design system that will re-energize portable fuel cell development programs around the world. The specific target for this milestone is a working prototype designed to be integrated with a representative notebook PC, and which surpasses the performance of today’s Lithium-ion batteries in terms of runtime versus size, and weight. The system will also offer the feature of essentially non-stop power with hot-swappable fuel cartridges. Additionally, upon achieving the fifth milestone, it should prove once and for all that a fuel-cell-based power module can have the size and performance consumers will require and desire for their increasingly power-hungry notebook computers.
PolyFuel recognized some time ago that despite the best efforts of many organizations ranging from leading consumer electronics companies to specialized start ups, commercialization of portable fuel cell technology was proving to be difficult for consumer electronic applications like notebook computers. In particular, reducing the size of the fuel cell systems to the point where they could beat the incumbent Lithium-ion battery technology is very challenging. In response, PolyFuel put together an aggressive internal program as part of its strategy of providing Engineering Support Services to its membrane customers. Under the program, PolyFuel is working not only on the membrane challenges, the Company’s area of proven expertise, but also on solving the system-level problems, such as water management, fuel delivery, packaging, notebook integration, and so forth. PolyFuel sought and received a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to support and expedite the program.
In early 2008, PolyFuel announced it had fundamentally solved the water management problem that has plagued portable fuel cell developers for nearly a decade. All fuel cells create water as a byproduct of the electricity generation process. In a direct methanol fuel cell, water is also an anode reactant so it is highly desirable to efficiently reuse the product water.
For this achievement, PolyFuel engineered an entirely new membrane, a breakthrough “membrane electrode assembly” (MEA) design, and a new system design that not only reduces the amount of water byproduct produced during fuel cell operation, but recycles a significant portion of that water directly back through the membrane to anode, where it is reused to generate more electricity. The new membrane and MEA allows the water to be kept in perfect balance throughout the system across a wide range of operating conditions. The result is a considerable simplification in the design of the fuel cell system, eliminating components, reducing overall size and weight, lowering cost and improving robustness. These are significant, as the primary difficulty with fuel cells has been to make them small enough to be able to be integrated into a notebook PC.
PolyFuel has now met the first four of the five milestones in this program. These include; (i) developing a conceptual design (with counterintuitive and novel approaches) for a complete fuel cell system that can outperform Lithium-ion batteries, (ii) engineer a new membrane that has a high level of water permeability but a low level of methanol diffusivity – usually mutually-exclusive attributes, (iii) designing an MEA that can recycle much of the water that is created in the fuel cell back to and through the newly engineered membrane, (iv) demonstrating the “proof of concept” by operating several single cells incorporating the newly-engineered membrane and MEA in perfect water balance using the conceptual system design target operating conditions.
With these results, PolyFuel has further progressed toward the fifth and final milestone in this program which is to create a reference design system that will re-energize portable fuel cell development programs around the world. The specific target for this milestone is a working prototype designed to be integrated with a representative notebook PC, and which surpasses the performance of today’s Lithium-ion batteries in terms of runtime versus size, and weight. The system will also offer the feature of essentially non-stop power with hot-swappable fuel cartridges. Additionally, upon achieving the fifth milestone, it should prove once and for all that a fuel-cell-based power module can have the size and performance consumers will require and desire for their increasingly power-hungry notebook computers.
Results from all five of these milestones will be presented.