The core idea behind the Open Fuel Cell is to unleash your creativity when it comes to modifying individual components—or even redesigning them entirely to match specific experimental requirements. So why not replace the “original” flow fields, which are fabricated from electronic circuit boards by milling, with flow fields made […]
Meetings
15 posts
Corrosion is one of the major threads endangering the fuel cell. Unlike, for example, a car—where the danger is a hole slowly corroded into a metal component—the real risk in a fuel cell is the release of metal ions during corrosion. These ions can poison both the catalyst layer and […]
Some people like to kick off their weekend with a beer in hand. Others prefer assembling 40 fuel cells. Why not both? Call it a General Assembly Meeting, if you will—except instead of bureaucracy, we had soldering irons and instead of endless discussions, we had screws. Lots of them. Today, […]
Today is the first Open Fuel Cell Meeting after I started working at ZBT. So I was able to pick up Leander and Frauke from the entrance and lead them to Burghard’s office. Today is the day on which we want to test a first OFC assembly for tightness. There […]
Livia and Roland are on vacation; so there is only a small Open Fuel Cell team meeting. We meet at the Chair of Energy Technology. Leander reports about the experiences he made when he tried to print more end plates using SLA. He had problems with the threads, which were […]
We meet again at May 9, this time at the NanoEnergieTechnikZentrum, NETZ. Leander is back from his holidays and amazingly added lots of CAD files to the website. Roland brought a package that was shipped to my name but it contained nothing related to the Open Fuel Cell but Merch […]
After a few weeks break, the open fuel cell team meets again. This time at the Chair of Manufacturing Engineering. Open Fuel Cells travel to Mannheim Burghard immediately starts to report: Alexandra and himself sent the fuel cell which we assembled in a previous meeting, together with another fuel cell […]
We thought this would be easy: milling the conductor plates according to Burghard’s design to produce the flowfield and the open electrode. We gave a set of milling cutters to Frauke from the FabLab and were excited to receive the cut parts within the next few days. Instead, we received […]
Amazingly, our group is growing and so is our determination to bring the open fuel cell to the world. We are thus very happy that it did not need an awful lot of advertisement for people to express their interest if the OFC. Lotay Tshering (prime minister of Bhutan), Peter […]
So we’ve printed the pressure plates on the SLA printer at the Chair for Energy Technology. The next step will be somewhat more difficult: milling the conductor plates, i.e. the flowfield and open electrode. For this, Leander reached out to his friend Livia who joined us today for our OFC […]