Ion Exchanger for Fuel Cell Coolant Loop as Customer Independent Market Product

Abstract

Fuel cells will play an important role in reducing CO₂ emissions from transport, especially for heavy duty use cases. Current fuel cell systems have an electrical efficiency of ~50%. The remaining 50% of energy lead to heat generation, which have to be removed by the coolant loop at very high flow rate. In order to ensure a robust running system and to avoid electric shorts, the electrical conductivity in the fuel cell stack has to be kept low. By using the ion exchange technology, ions, which are released by several components in the coolant loop, are separated. In addition to highly-efficient ion removal, low pressure drop, mechanical robustness and costs are the challenges in the development of such ion exchangers. MANN + HUMMEL has developed a customer independent design, which is available as market product and covering most of current system requirements. This paper summarizes the product design and testing on ion exchange resin and product basis as well as the MANN + HUMMEL market product approach to reduce systems costs by standardization of components. Furthermore, a brief outline of a particle filter for a FC coolant loop is given.