Flow field designs of fuel cells theory and applications（1）

       The 6th ENGII Conference——Despite huge investment and efforts in the last three decades, fuel cells are still known as a fledgling industry after 170 years of the first fuel cell by Glove. There were unrealistic promises that the goals of commercialization of fuel cells were attainable and created false expectations in the public community and investors who, once again, would see a deadline come and go without the huge victory promised. Unless one really understands those challenges in commercialization there is little chance of solving them. In fact, we have no any clear idea of both theoretical solution and technical measures how to solve durability, reliability and robustness so far. There is the major challenge to transform a laboratory scale production of fuel cells to an industrial scale one and to meet the requirements of throughput, operating life, low cost,reliability and high efficiency in R&D of fuel cells. Why the simpler structure fuel cells still lag far from the steam and IC engines after massive investment in the past years? Why upscaling of fuel cells failed often when many researchers stated their successes in small scale? Surprisingly, these facts and figures are neither questioned nor discussed by expert groups and annual merit reviews.Therefore, the real cause of upscaling failures has not been realized well yet in R & D of fuel cells.Fuel cell industry faces a precipice in spite of many claimed successes. As Dr Adamson said, ‘It really is do or die time in the industry. It is up to the industry itself to decide which scenario becomes reality.’ Fuel cells need not tactical fixes using nano-materials or catalyst but strategic solutions. Science and technology are not for eye-catch but for practical solutions of real problems. Designs of uniform flow distribution arecentral to upscale fuel cells as well as to tackle critical issues of durability, robustness and reliability. Despite our growing appreciation of the uniform flowdistribution in the flow field designs, a critical fact is that thedesigns of the uniform flow distributions are still based onempirical and qualitative approaches. In this talk, we introduce history of fuel cell development and concepts and criteria of flow field designs. Then, we present main issues and challenges to address and development of theoretical models. Finally, we discuss basic design procedure and applications.