Comparative exergy analysis of direct alcohol fuel cells using fuel mixtures

Within the last year there has been increasing interest in direct fuel cells as power sources for portable devices and in the future power plants for electric vehicles and other transport media as ships will join those applications. Methanol is considerably more convenient and easy to use than gaseous hydrogen and considerable work is devoted to the development of direct methanol fuel cells. But ethanol has much lower toxicity and from an ecological viewpoint ethanol is exceptional among all other types of fuel as is the only chemical fuel in renewable supply. The aim of this study is to investigate the possibility of using direct alcohol fuel cells fed with alcohol mixtures. For this purpose a comparative exergy analysis of a direct alcohol fuel cell fed with alcohol mixtures against the same fuel cell fed with single alcohols is performed. The exergetic efficiency and the exergy loss and destruction are calculated and compared in each case. When alcohol mixtures are fed to the fuel cell, the contribution of each fuel to the fuel cell performance is weighted attending to their relative proportion in the aqueous solution. The optimum alcohol composition for methanol/ethanol mixtures has been determined. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.