Abstract
Fuel cells (FC) can hardly react a hundred percent of fuel, because the cell potential becomes zero if all of the fuel is consumed at FC. Therefore a small amount of fuel is released from FC, even when pure H2 gas is used as fuel. If the space, where the exhaust H2 is released, is closed up such as the space of deep underground or undersea, the released amount of H2 may be restricted to an allowable level. The depleted H2 can be recovered by the hydrogen separation pump (HSP) such as proposed here. When we supply electricity to the polymer electrolyte by an external power source, H2 can easily be separated and pumped up from anode to cathode according to the principle of “concentration cell". In this study we have preliminarily tested the HSP, and our experimental results show that the HSP can work as a good separation and compression pump of exhausted hydrogen from FC. The typical cell potential was 100mV for HSP at our experimental condition of current density of 0.49A/cm2 and H2 treatment ratio of 98%.
