title: Ultrasonic radiation to enable improvement of direct methanol fuel cell.
abstract: To improve DMFC (direct methanol fuel cell) performance, a new method using ultrasonic radiation is proposed and a novel DMFC structure is designed and fabricated in the present paper. Three ultrasonic transducers (piezoelectric transducer, PZT) are integrated in the flow field plate to form the ultrasonic field in the liquid fuel. Ultrasonic frequency, acoustic power, and methanol concentration have been considered as variables in the experiments. With the help of ultrasonic radiation, the maximum output power and limiting current of cell can be independently increased by 30.73% and 40.54%, respectively. The best performance of DMFC is obtained at the condition of ultrasonic radiation (30 kHz and 4 W) fed with 2M methanol solution, because both its limiting current and output power reach their maximum value simultaneously (222 mA and 33.6 mW, respectively) under this condition. These results conclude that ultrasonic can be an alternative choice for improving the cell performance, and can facilitate a guideline for the optimization of DMFC.
authors.affiliation: School of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, 122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan, Hubei 430070, PR China; Hubei Digital Manufacturing Key Laboratory, Wuhan University of Technology, 122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan, Hubei 430070, PR China. Electronic address: chaoqunwu@whut.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Chaoqun
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: School of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, 122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan, Hubei 430070, PR China. Electronic address: five.j@163.com.
authors.forename: Jiang
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: School of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, 122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan, Hubei 430070, PR China. Electronic address: luoh430@163.com.
authors.forename: Hao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Luo
authors.affiliation: School of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, 122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan, Hubei 430070, PR China. Electronic address: Wangsw@whut.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Sanwu
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, 122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan, Hubei 430070, PR China. Electronic address: chent29@whut.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Tao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Chen
keywords: Acoustic power; Catalyst poisoning; Cell performance; Direct methanol fuel cell; Ultrasonic frequency; Ultrasonic radiation