Regulation of Power Conversion in Fuel Cells

Here we report a regulation about power conversion in fuel cells. This regulation is expressed as that total power produced by fuel cells is always proportional to the square of the potential difference between the equilibrium potential and work potential. With this regulation we deduced fuel cell performance equation which can describe the potential vs. the current performance curves, namely, polarization curves of fuel cells with three power source parameters: equilibrium potential E0; internal resistance R; and power conversion coefficient K. The concept of the power conversion coefficient is a new criterion to evaluate and compare the characteristics and capacity of different fuel cells. The calculated values obtained with this equation agree with practical performance of different types of fuel cells.