Scale up solutions for liquid based microfluidic fuel cell

A microfluidic fuel cell is a microfabricated device that produces electrical power through electrochemical reactions involving a fuel and an oxidant. In this study, vanadium redox electrolytes will be used as reactants. Microfluidic fuel cell systems exploit co-laminar flow on the microscale to separate the fuel and oxidant species, in contrast to conventional fuel cells employing an ion exchange membrane for this function. In order to maintain this regime specific to microscale, the size of the device is limited, which directly impacts the power output. In this study, scale up methods are investigated. In order to keep the microfluidic co-laminar flow regime, flow distribution over the whole active area is the main challenge. Two approaches have been investigated: a multiplexing approach and a dimensional scale up approach. For both solutions, prototypes have been designed, built, tested with Vanadium electrolytes as reactants, and compared with the performance of a unit cell. With the multiplexing approach, we managed to get performance on par with the unit cell, with the dimensional scale up, we managed to have a total power output of 130mW, the highest power output reported yet for microfluidic fuel cells.