Hardware/software data acquisition system for real time cell temperature monitoring in air-cooled polymer electrolyte fuel cells

This work presents a hardware/software data acquisition system developed for monitoring the temperature in real time of the cells in Air-Cooled Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells (AC-PEFC). These fuel cells are of great interest because they can carry out, in a single operation, the processes of oxidation and refrigeration. This allows reduction of weight, volume, cost and complexity of the control system in the AC-PEFC. In this type of PEFC (and in general in any PEFC), the reliable monitoring of temperature along the entire surface of the stack is fundamental, since a suitable temperature and a regular distribution thereof, are key for a better performance of the stack and a longer lifetime under the best operating conditions. The developed data acquisition (DAQ) system can perform non-intrusive temperature measurements of each individual cell of an AC-PEFC stack of any power (from watts to kilowatts). The stack power is related to the temperature gradient; i.e., a higher power corresponds to a higher stack surface, and consequently higher temperature difference between the coldest and the hottest point. The developed DAQ system has been implemented with the low-cost open-source platform Arduino, and it is completed with a modular virtual instrument that has been developed using NI LabVIEW. Temperature vs time evolution of all the cells of an AC-PEFC both together and individually can be registered and supervised. The paper explains comprehensively the developed DAQ system together with experimental results that demonstrate the suitability of the system.