Nathanial Cooper

Imperial College London | Imperial · Department of Chemical Engineering

Biomass and the bio-economy have strong potential to help shift dependency away from petroleum. Supply chain optimisation (SCO) has been used to help other industries and can be used to boost biomass industry viability. Biomass supply chain models frequently average the biomass yield of large tracts of land in their calculations. However, there can...

Given the need to shift away from fossil fuels, expanding the role of the bioeconomy is vitally important. Biomass supply chain optimisation is a tool that has been used to help the biomass industry gain a foothold. Biomass supply chain models frequently use the average biomass yield of large areas to calculate overall yield. However, there can be...

While electricity access is lowest in developing countries, the academic literature on generation expansion planning (GEP) has been informed almost exclusively by challenges in industrialised countries. This paper presents the first multi-objective, long-term energy planning optimisation model tailored towards national power systems with little exi...

A method which allows for the comparison of polymer electrolyte fuel cell (PEFC) bipolar plates (BPs) with various channel dimensions is outlined here. It is applied to data from an experiment with different channel and land width and channel depth combinations for interdigitated and parallel designs. Channel and land width and channel depth varied...

Metal foam has been regarded as one of the most important replacement for the conventional flow distributor of commercial fuel cells in recent years. One critical issue for the commercialization of proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell is the successful startup from subzero temperatures. In this study, experimental tests on a PEM fuel cell using...

This work uses neutron radiography to examine the through-plane liquid water distribution of an operating polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) with a Sigracet SGL 25BC, a 235 μm thick, 2D straight fiber Gas Diffusion Layer (GDL). This work is performed for interdigitated flow fields at several cross flow rates, and a parallel flow field f...

The goal of this study was to determine the main cause of performance improvement in decreasing aspect ratio interdigitated flow fields, where aspect ratio is the channel length to width ratio. An experimental test cell with an interdigitated flow field operated under various aspect ratios found increasing net power densities with decreasing aspect...

Proper flow field design is an active research topic in the pursuit of improving performance for Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFC). Important concerns remain as PEMFCs come to mass market including increasing power density, and decreasing system cost. Increasing the power density of fuel cells reduces the size and cost of a system for...

Flow field design remains an important research topic in the pursuit of higher energy density and increased stability in Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) systems. Many PEMFC manufactures have reduced channel feature dimensions considerably to enhance catalyst layer reactant delivery as well as to reduce overall stack volume. This work...

Novel water management and reactant distribution strategies are critical to next generation polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell systems (PEMFCs). Improving these strategies in PEMFCs leads to higher power density and reduced stack size for vehicle applications, which reduces weight and improves the price competitiveness of these systems. Interdi...

This study examines the effect of increased channel length on the distribution of flow gases and cell performance in an interdigitated flow-field PEMFC. A numerical model was used to simulate the pressure distribution and gas flow in 5 cm and 25 cm channel length interdigitated flow fields that have eight channels with fixed channel and land widths...

(Full Version) https://aiche.confex.com/aiche/2013/webprogram/Paper326760.html Novel water and reactant distribution strategies are important to the development of next generation polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell systems (PEMFCs). Over-hydration (flooding) or under-hydration (membrane drying) of channels and critical membrane electrode ass...