scholarly journals Design of an unmanned aircraft system for high-altitude 1 kW fuel cell power system

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Reid ◽  
Ibrahim M. Albayati

AbstractA proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell is particularly considered as a prime power supply for a fuel cell-powered unmanned aircraft system (UAS) as it possesses a very high-power density in comparison with other fuel cell types, hence a high potential to be used for high altitude long endurance (HALE) UAS flights. This paper will focus on examining the design requirements for the UAS-based 1 kW PEM fuel cell for high altitude operation (10–11 km), which can be correlated into a quantitative data to produce a design constraints diagram. The maximum take-off mass, endurance, and geometries for potential UAS design are estimated. Four different geometrical design profiles are developed and presented. The resulting geometries are analysed and the design parameters of the estimated 1 kW design yielded an aircraft of maximum take-off mass 34.8 kg, wingspan of 10.4 m, cruising speed 20 m/s, stall speed 11.23 m/s, and maximum endurance of 4 h. The constraint diagram deploys these assumptions as well as values generated through the design calculations to form a possible design of which the 1 kW UAS falls slightly outside of the possible design space; this is due to the minimum thrust-to-weight ratio required to achieve the desired service ceiling; however, further alterations and adjustments on the design and mission requirements are provided to place the design of the UAS within the possible design space.

2014 ◽  
Vol 592-594 ◽  
pp. 1672-1676 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Lakshminarayanan ◽  
P. Karthikeyan ◽  
M. Muthukumar ◽  
A.P. Senthil Kumar ◽  
B. Kavin ◽  
...  

The Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) Fuel Cell performance not only depends on the operating parameters like temperature, pressure, the stoichiometric ratio of reactants, relative humidity and back pressure on anode and cathode flow channels, but it also depends on design parameters like channel width to rib width, channel depth and number of passes on the flow channel. In this paper numerical analysis were carried out with six different cross-sections of the channel, namely square, triangle, parallelogram 14o, parallelogram 26o, trapezium and inverted trapezium of 1.25 cm2active area with a constant cross sectional area of 0.01 cm2of single pass PEM fuel cell. The model was created and simulated under various pressures and temperature with a constant mass flow rate by using fluent CFD and the influence of the single pass flow channel on the performance of PEM fuel cell has been investigated.


Author(s):  
Suraj G. Gupta ◽  
Mangesh Ghonge ◽  
Pradip M. Jawandhiya

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (14) ◽  
pp. 6348
Author(s):  
Zijun Yang ◽  
Bowen Wang ◽  
Xia Sheng ◽  
Yupeng Wang ◽  
Qiang Ren ◽  
...  

The dead-ended anode (DEA) and anode recirculation operations are commonly used to improve the hydrogen utilization of automotive proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells. The cell performance will decline over time due to the nitrogen crossover and liquid water accumulation in the anode. Highly efficient prediction of the short-term degradation behaviors of the PEM fuel cell has great significance. In this paper, we propose a data-driven degradation prediction method based on multivariate polynomial regression (MPR) and artificial neural network (ANN). This method first predicts the initial value of cell performance, and then the cell performance variations over time are predicted to describe the degradation behaviors of the PEM fuel cell. Two cases of degradation data, the PEM fuel cell in the DEA and anode recirculation modes, are employed to train the model and demonstrate the validation of the proposed method. The results show that the mean relative errors predicted by the proposed method are much smaller than those by only using the ANN or MPR. The predictive performance of the two-hidden-layer ANN is significantly better than that of the one-hidden-layer ANN. The performance curves predicted by using the sigmoid activation function are smoother and more realistic than that by using rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function.


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