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Direct Alcohol and Borohydride Alkaline Fuel Cells

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Book cover Recent Trends in Fuel Cell Science and Technology

Abstract

The alkaline fuel cell (AFC) was the first fuel cell technology used in many practical services like Apollo space mission and running an automobile (Kordesch et al. 1999, Carrette et al. 2001). It is a low temperature fuel cell technology, which uses hydrogen as a fuel, oxygen or air as oxidant and alkaline solution as electrolyte. The development of AFC technology has reached its peak in the beginning of 1980s (Schulze et al. 2004) but its further development is stopped due to many technical, commercial and safety issues. The research and development on fuel cell is gaining momentum as a new way power generation technology, which is environmental friendly. The main focus of technology development of fuel cells is to increase the power output per unit area of electrode at low cost. The interest in AFC increased again due to more favorable oxygen reduction (Burchardt et al. 2002, Yu et al. 2004) and fuel oxidation reactions (Wang et al. 2003, Rahim et al. 2004) in alkaline condition. Apart from these, the cost, simplicity, efficiency and the possibility to use the non-noble metal catalyst (Schulze et al. 2004, Cifrain et al. 2003a) compared to other low temperature fuel cell technology have given an impetus to the AFC research. A detailed comparison of AFC with polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is given by McLean et al. (2002).

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  1. Anil Verma

    Present address: Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, Assam, 781039, India

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  1. Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, New Delhi, 110 016, India

    Anil Verma & Suddhasatwa Basu

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  2. Suddhasatwa Basu
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  1. Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, 110 016, India

    Suddhasatwa Basu

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© 2007 Anamaya Publishers, New Delhi, India

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Verma, A., Basu, S. (2007). Direct Alcohol and Borohydride Alkaline Fuel Cells. In: Basu, S. (eds) Recent Trends in Fuel Cell Science and Technology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-68815-2_7

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