MMAE Seminar - Dr. Matthew Mench - Insights into High Performance PEM Fuel Cell Architecture

Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Dr. Matthew Mench, the Department Head of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Tennessee and Condra Chair of Excellence in Mechanical Engineering, on Wednesday, September 4th, to present his lecture, Insights into High Performance PEM Fuel Cell Architecture.

Abstract

The ability to engineer transport of mass, heat, and charge in electrochemical power conversion and storage systems such as fuel cells and batteries is critical to ensure optimal operational stability, durability, and performance. I this talk, I will discuss a combination of computational and experimental approaches that help us to understand and optimize system performance and durability in polymer electrolyte fuel cell systems. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss a collection of insights related to manipulation of heat and mass transfer in polymer electrolyte fuel cells throughout the system architecture within the materials and along interfaces. In a traditional land/channel architecture, there is a biased water, temperature and compression distribution that can limit performance and durability in a variety of ways. To overcome this limitation, we can potentially engineer the material interfaces and mass transport, change the architecture or design to eliminate channel/land bias, or manipulate bulk material thermal or mass transport parameters. This presentation will focus on these three approaches and the resultant impact on performance and durability in these systems. With a non-conventional architecture, we have shown a tremendous reduction in mass transport losses that allow us to push beyond 2 A/cm2 at high voltage. In this high performance system, dryout of the anode is the limiting behavior. Thus, there is a desire to control the direction and magnitude of the net water flux across the fuel cell. Depending on time, recent work in redox flow battery systems for grid-level energy storage will also be discussed. Both systems have complex transport issues which, when engineered through materials, cell architecture or other methodologies can be optimized.

Biography

Matthew Mench received his MS and PhD from the Penn State University in 1996 and 2000, respectively. He is presently the Department Head of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Tennessee and Professor and Condra Chair of Excellence in Mechanical Engineering, with joint appointments at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and in Chemical Engineering. He has published over 150 peer reviewed publications with over 10,000 citations and an h-index of 51 according to Google Scholar. He has multiple patents granted, licensed, or under review, and authored the textbook Fuel Cell Engines. He was selected by Thomson Reuters as a Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) for 2014 in the category of engineering. This distinction is based on the greatest numbers of publications officially designated by Essential Science Indicators℠ as Highly Cited Papers—ranking among the top 1% most cited for their subject field and year of publication for the decade previous to selection. He was recently on the 2016 List of The 150 Most Cited Scholars in Energy Research by Elsevier Scopus Data. Dr. Mench is an ASME Fellow, was elected by peers to serve on the Department Heads Executive Committee of the ASME, and also previously served as the Executive Vice President of the International Association for Hydrogen Energy. He is an Associate Editor Emeritus for the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy and is currently an Associate Editor with the ASME journal of Electrochemical Energy Conversion and Storage. He was awarded a National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award in 2006, was a recipient of the Penn State Engineering Society Premier Teaching Award in 2009, a University of Tennessee Research Fellow award in 2013, a UT Research Foundation Innovation award in 2015, and a UT College of Engineering Translational Research Award in 2016. His research interests span multi-phase transport phenomena, advanced diagnostics, sensors, and modeling of power conversion and storage systems.