Is the open fuel cell just meant to be a nice to have item used for some basic educational applications? By far: NO!
On the 13th and 14th September 2023 our little open fuel cell had its debut on the hy-fcell exhibition in Stuttgart. This exhibition is one of the places where the professional hydrogen and fuel cell community meets to discuss the latest advances in that area, transfer knowledge and (since it is a fair for professional companies) to seek for new business opportunities.
The open fuel cell was part of the booth of the ZBT – the hydrogen and fuel cell center. Here it shined between all the exhibits highlighting the research and development activities reaching from material characterization, injection molding of highly filled polymers in order to produce bipolar plates for PEMFC up to sophisticated test equipment required to characterize those plates. Doesn’t it seem to be a little odd to place the low-cost 3D-printed PEMFC next to that professional equipment? Just jump back to the introduction of the open fuel cell project. That little cell was originally developed to be the workhorse for the development of the new measuring technology of the integrated reference electrodes as part of the SAFEREF project. To be honest: while a poster showing some diagrams may help to transfer the first hints of your work, the real impression will be transferred by showing the original cells as well as the exploded model equipped with your development. Therefore, apart from spreading the idea of the open source and easy to build open fuel cell itself, the open fuel cell was also used to demonstrate the results of an industrial grade research project.
Surely the highlight was when people from the neighboring booth came over and used the exploded model of the open fuel cell to explain where their products are located in commercial fuel cells used for serious power generation. In addition to the application range „from the first experiments up to fully fledged research projects“ mentioned of the leaflet that may have brought you to this page, the topic of presenting the results of your projects can defnetly be added to that list.
Here I would like to thank all the people we had a nice and inspiring conversation with during that exhibition.
