The UK has a commitment to reduce green house gas emissions by 80% by 2050. To achieve this the UK energy sector has to migrate towards supplying innovative, high quality, highly reliable, low or zero emission energy generation sources. Hydrogen and fuel cells have emerged as potential initiatives that could serve as alternative energy sources. They are currently being engineered for a range of applications including automotive, stationary power, aerospace and consumer electronics. Each application presents its own set of requirements for the fuel cell system including performance, operating range and cost. With the introduction of a new technology into markets, where existing products are highly reliable, requires that this aspect of the system performance must match customer expectations which are demanded for a new product. The area of focus of this research aims to improve the durability and reliability of this new energy source by better system integration and design optimisation, coupled with effective health management to maximise the life of the power source. The outcome is a real time dynamic and adaptive intelligent lifecycle infrastructure with leading edge research in system design for reliability, prognostics and diagnostics, and semantically modeling relationships been the product and the environment for fuel cells, achieved through a multidisciplinary approach, including the areas of mathematics, information science and engineering. The dividends both in design efficiencies and lifecycle management can be achieved placing hydrogen and fuel cell power sources at the forefront of future UK energy provision.

It is not possible to understand the way that a fuel cell operates without understanding how reactants, products, heat and electrochemical potential varies within that fuel cell. A consequence of this is that in order to obtain the best performance out of a fuel cell we cannot treat it like a simple electrical device with a positive and negative terminal: we need to be able to understand what is happening at different points within that fuel cell. Put simply, the purpose of this project is to develop a new way to image what is happening within an operating fuel cell. That is, to develop a way in which we can see how well the different parts of the fuel cell is operating - whether they are operating well, or starved of reactants, or undergoing damaging processes which will limit the longevity of the system.In this programme we intend to build on previous work at NPL, Imperial and UCL to develop a world-class instrument to allow us to study what is happening within an operating fuel cell. We will utilise a specially instrumented fuel cell which will allow us to monitor several very important parameters in real time. In this way we can monitor how the fuel cell operates under the different extreme conditions imposed on it during both normal and abnormal operating conditions. Examples of such extreme conditions occur when the fuel cell is started up, or shut down or when the fuel cell is pushed to perform at the limits of its performance (as might be expected during an overtaking manoeuvre if the fuel cell were powering a vehicle). Results of this research will be utilised to improve the design of the fuel cell.The hardware will be designed and built at Imperial College, and tested at both Imperial and NPL. A bipolar plate rapid prototyping facility will be built at UCL which will allow us to experiment with different flow-field geometries in order to achieve as even as possible distribution of the parameters being measured with the fuel cell mapping hardware. Modelling will be performed at UCL in order to test improvements to the performance of the cells brought about by using different flow-field architecturesWe have engaged with two major UK fuel cell companies, Johnson Matthey and Intelligent Energy, who are interested in utilising the instrumentation and results of this work.

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In this proposal we are bringing together a number of individuals and institutions with a varied and complimentary skill set appropriate for the proposed work. All members of the team have an extensive and world-class background in fuel cell research and development, and the institutions which they work are well provisioned to undertake this work. Furthermore we are supported by a number of Institutions and companies. The project is based around four research work packages and one coordinating work package. * Operation of fuel cells on "dirty" fuels Fuel cells typically require high quality hydrogen to prevent the poisoning of catalysts and membranes. This not only increases the cost of fuels, but limits the possible sources that can be used unless extensive clean-up methods are used. We intend to study the poisoning mechanism and poison content of fuels/air; develop catalysts with improved poison resistance. The goal is improvement in operation of fuel cells on typically available fuels in the near term, and use of "dirtier fuels" (biogenic sources) in the longer term. * Reduction of the cost of fuel cells Catalyst costs are one of the major components of fuel cell system cost (~25-30% of total). We intend to look at reduced platinum loading systems and how these systems interact with poor quality fuel/air. In the short term the desire is to reduce the cost and catalyst requirements. Over the longer term there is the desire to transition to new catalysts. Hence, we will also look at the development of new non-precious metal (or reduced precious metal) catalysts and the integration of these catalysts with new catalyst supports. * Improvement in fuel cell longevity Fuel cell longevity is a function of catalyst degradation and extreme conditions occurring during start-up/shut down and other extraneous events. Within this work package we will examine diagnostics to interrogate and understand the degradation processes and the development of improved catalyst supports and catalysts to resist degradation. * Improving fuel cell systems efficiency Improving fuel cell efficiency is associated with diagnosing the bottlenecks and those areas where the majority of losses are occurring. We will facilitate this process by developing and applying a range of in-cell and in-stack approaches to understand where those efficiency losses are occurring. At the same time we will examine the development of fuel cell balance of plant components to improve system efficiency. These approaches will be coupled with system modeling to assess the best areas to achieve performance gains.

The goal of this Korea-UK research initiative is to address Research theme 1 (Innovative concepts from Electrodes to stack) of the EPSRC-KETEP Call for Collaborative Research with Korea on Fuel Cell Technologies. The proposal also covers some aspects of Research theme 2 (Predictive control for performance and degradation mitigation). Hence, this research is associated with improving the lifetime and performance of polymer electrolyte fuel cells. Within this project we will develop new corrosion resistant catalyst supports and catalyse those supports utilising a new catalysis technique. We will also examine the development of porous bipolar plates and see how we can integrate those bipolar plates and catalysts within a fuel cell. We will trial the materials in test stacks and look at the performance and longevity of these new materials. Parallel to this work, we will use state of the art x-ray tomography and other imaging techniques to assess the performance of the materials under real operating conditions. Information from these tests will allow us to develop a methodological framework to simulate the performance of the fuel cells. This framework will then be used to build more efficient control strategies for our higher performance fuel cell systems. We will also build a strong and long-lasting collaborative framework between Korea and the UK for both academic research and commercial trade. The project will benefit from the complementary strengths of the Korean and UK PEFC programmes, and represents a significant international activity in fuel cell research that includes a focus on the challenging issues of cost reduction and performance enhancement. The project will have particularly high impact and added value due to a strong personnel exchange programme with researchers spending several months in each other's labs; highly relevant industrial collaboration; and links with the H2FC Supergen. We have strong support from industrial companies in both the UK and Korea who will support our goals of developing new catalysts for fuel cells (Amalyst - UK, and RTX Corporation - Korea), new corrosion resistant porous bipolar plates (NPL-UK; Hyundai Hysco and Hankook tire (Korea)), and fuel cell and system integrators (Arcola Energy and Intelligent Energy (UK)).