Novel manufacturing and testing processes of PEM fuel cells for unmanned aerial vehicles

Fuel cells are one of the good candidates for powering unmanned aerial vehicles due to their low weight and hig durability when compared to well known batteries, e.g. lithium polymer batteries. Fuel cells especially with recent developments in Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFC) provide longer flying times up to three times that of lithium batteries. This makes them highly suitable in unmanned aerial vehicles. For these reasons, the intellectual property obtained from a project supported by Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology was used for manfacturing PEM fuel cells producing 50, 110, 150 and 200 Watts to make them available for unmanned aerial vehicles. Since the heart of the any fuel cell is the membrane electrode assembly, the performance of a fuel cell is mainly dependent on the structure of the membrane electrode assembly. Therefore, we mainly concentrated on increasing the performances of the membrane electrode assemblies that will eventually be used in these fuel cells manufactured within this study. For this purpose membrane electrode assemblies with various catalyst surfaces and thicknesses were tested. The influence of several other parameters such as the amount of pressure applied on the membrane electrode assembly, platinum sputtering on cathode as well as gas diffusion layers and laminating the gas diffusion layer to the membrane electrode assembly with ionomer and catalyst solution on the PEMFC performance were evaluated. Also, other critical parameters such as compression of the whole stack of the fuel cell and the purging time with the purge valve were analyzed to better utilize them in unmanned air vehicles. With this work, to the best our knowledge for the first time in Turkey, fuel cells at various powers available for unmanned aerial vehicles were produced and tested.