A few weeks back, Samantha, Celine and myself became a team; and after lots of brainstorming ideas, we decided to work on a Fuel cell. A fuel cell is a device that uses a chemical reaction to convert chemical energy from the fuel into electricity. The residual by product that comes out of the process is none other than water, which is very environmental friendly. The main reason we chose this topic was to be of relevance was mainly because throughout this course, we’ve been writing blogs about green energy and the possibility of environmental improvements.

Although all three of us had very conflicting schedules, we managed to meet a few times in order to advance in our project. The first phase was the powerpoint presentation. We, each, had to have a good understanding of our topic, and each of us had to work on parts of the project. I was responsible for the explanation of the fuel cell process, Samantha’s input was to give people a clear understanding of the experiment’s procedure and finally Celine was in charge of the advantages and disadvantages of the fuel cell.

Over the course of the following weeks we encountered a few hurdles. We realized that building the fuel cell was quite easy but in fact that the needed platinum was virtually impossible to obtain. Platinum is currently selling for $1700 an ounce; thus making the prices of platinum wire much too expensive for college students to afford. We searched and searched and finally Samantha found wire that was $2.00 an inch with a diameter of .001 milimeters. We were excited becasue without the Platinum which acts as the catalyst there would be no reverse reaction of electrolysis.

Finally, the platinum arrived. Much to our dismay the platinum was no thinker than one strand of hair. We worried that this little amount of platinum would not suffice and that we had spent all of this time on a project that would could not get to work. We tried dispite this set back and luckily we were successful! The fuel cell was tested when no had been connected to the fuel cell. This reading was 0 volts. This reading is to calculate a base line, a reading that should be obtained without the electrical energy. Next we connected the battery. The reading was 8.9 Volts. This reading head steady. Next, we disconnected the battery. We watched in awe as the voltage meter dropped but did not fully decline to 0. The idea behind this is that the platinum is the catalyst. It is reversing the processes of the oxygen and the hydrogen being split by the electrical energy from the battery. The platinum recombines these molecules and the fuel cell will produce energy without the current from the battery. This is proven by the fact that the voltage reading did not go back to 0.

We were glad we were able to work out some of the kinks in our project. Along the way we learned how a fuel cell works and why at the moment with platinum being so expensive that it is not economically efficient. We do expect though that the fuel cell will become much more previlant, especially in cars. All in all we had fun and we learned something new!