(215f) Material and Heat Management in a Dmfc for Portable Usage

A Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) is one of the candidates for the next generation power source for portable equipments, such as portable PCs, cellular phones, PDAs, etc. because of higher energy density of fuel than that of secondary batteries. DMFC is a kind of chemical plants; fuel and air are injected to a stack, and the exhaust from a stack need to be processed, also the feed rate, concentration of methanol and temperature need to be controlled. We designed a DMFC system for portable usage based on cell performance and operating conditions. Cell performance such as I-V characteristic, methanol crossover affects on not only power generation efficiency but also heat radiation. Heat radiation from DMFC system is one of the important issues to be paid attention to make a DMFC system be small and be operated stably. We developed a prototype DMFC system in order to supply power for a B5 size note PC. Average 13W power was supplied to a PC from a DMFC, and neat methanol consumption as fuel was about 10cc per hour.