The design and usage of a visual direct methanol fuel cell

In order to better understand the influence of gas evolution on the performance of the direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) anode, a visual DMFC, comprising of a transparent anode and a cathode endplate with an integrated heat exchanger, and a picture analysis methodology were developed. The result was an inexpensive, but very powerful, tool for analyzing the role of two-phase flow. An important finding is that gas bubbles do not appear uniformly throughout the fluid flow matrix, but rather only at a few active sites. Another important finding is that the gas saturation (volume fraction of gas/volume fraction of liquid) increases along the streamwise direction.