CONCLUSIONS AND PROGNOSIS

Abstract

Even though the concept of the fuel cell was discovered by William Grove in 1839, there was no successful attempt to engineer a fuel cell until the work of Francis Thomas Bacon that started in the early 1930s and culminated in the demonstration of a 5-kW fuel cell in 1959. This high temperature, high pressure alkaline fuel cell (AFC) had the capability of current densities of 1000 mA/cm² at 0.8 V, a performance comparable to the best fuel cells produced today. Pratt and Whitney adapted the Bacon design to produce AFCs for the NASA Apollo and shuttle programs. This development resulted in an enormous amount of activity in fuel cells in the U.S. in the late fifties and early sixties. Two famous projects from that time were the fuel cell tractor at Allis-Chalmers and the development of the solid polymer electrolyte fuel cell at General Electric. Because of trademark issues the latter has been called the PEMFC. These activities also resulted in the development of four other types of fuel cells: the PAFC, DMFC, MCFC, and SOFC. When it became obvious that carbonaceous fuels yielded very low current densities in low temperature fuel cells, interest in fuel cells rapidly waned by the end of the sixties.