UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST
FACULTY OF PHYSICS

Guest
2024-11-22 2:37
 HOME     CONFERENCES     SEARCH            LOGIN     NEW USER     IMAGES   


Conference: Bucharest University Faculty of Physics 2021 Meeting


Section: Physics and Technology of Renewable and Alternative Energy Sources


Title:
Software application to determine the theoretical potential and efficiency of fuel cells.


Authors:
Anda CIOBANU(1), Sanda VOINEA(1,2)


*
Affiliation:
1)University of Bucharest, Faculty of Physics, 405 Atomistilor Street, 077125, Magurele, Romania

2)University of Bucharest, Faculty of Physics, 3NanoSAE Research Center, PO Box MG 38, 077125, Bucharest-Magurele, Romania


E-mail
andacbn@yahoo.com


Keywords:
fuel cell, theoretical potential, efficiency, software application


Abstract:
The continuous increase in energy consumption, the reduction of fossil fuel resources and the critical issues problems related to pollution, lead the researchers to obtain energy for alternative solutions. The fuel cell represent a simple way to convert the chemical energy stored in the hydrogen bond, in the presence of a catalyst, and to transform into heat or mechanical work. Regardless of the type of fuel cells, their study start from the chemical reactions that take place at the anode, cathode and general reaction, in order to finally determine the theoretical potential and efficiency of the fuel cell. Because the calculation steps are the same for any type of fuel cell, we created an application using the Colaboratory platform, a free Jupyter notebook environment that requires no setup and runs entirely in the cloud, to calculate the parameters described above. The application was designed as an interface between the user and the program algorithm. Thus, the user enters, step by step, the data as reaction coefficients, entropies or enthalpies of the substances involved in the reaction and runs the code cells to obtain the theoretical efficiency of the fuel cells. The software application is presented in detail for calculating the parameters of the H2-O2 fuel cell and tested for the alcohol-powered fuel cells (methanol, ethanol).