Optimization of cell components on the Direct Carbon Fuel Cell

Although the global warming is becoming a world-wide problem, nuclear power plant, which had expected to solve this problem, has been avoided after the accident of Nuclear Power Plants at Fukushima. Therefore, it is necessary to use fossil fuels efficiently in order to solve the problem. Direct Carbon Fuel Cells (DCFC) is a type of high temperature fuel cells using a molten carbonate as electrolyte and can generate electrical energy in higher efficiency by the electrochemical oxidation of solid carbon such as a coal. However, because the study of DCFC is hardly reported, we evaluated the fundamental cell performance using the prototype-DCFC. The influence on the cell performance by kind fuel (activated carbon, brown coal) and kind of electrolyte (Li/KCO3, Li/NaCO3) is evaluated. As a result, a fuel and an electrolyte exert a big influence on the DCFC performance, and the cell structure of DCFC should be also optimized to increase the contact of the electrolyte and solid fuel on the anode side.