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Design and Implementation of a Hydrogen Fuel Cell Data Acquisition and Monitoring Scheme for Educational Institutions

Abstract One of the challenges of the fuel cell power systems is proper monitoring, instrumentation and data acquisition of system parameters such as fuel flow into the system, AC and DC voltage values, load current, humidity, DC and AC power, pressure, temperature, fuel utilization, overall system efficiency, noise, etc. Fuel cell test systems must precisely monitor and control these measurements in real-time. It is necessary to have an instrumentation system which is able to monitor and control fuel cell operation under varying conditions. Therefore, a typical fuel cell test system requires high-resolution, isolation, and waveform acquisition capability. This paper describes design and implementation of a hydrogen fuel cell data acquisition and monitoring scheme for a BS degree offering engineering technology institution. The objective of this applied research project is to design and implement a high-resolution data acquisition and interface module for a 500 W Hydrogen fuel cell power station using LabView™ PDS v8.20 software and field point based data acquisition modules. The developed data acquisition system is used as an educational tool in undergraduate and graduate instrumentation and data acquisition classes.

Introduction The conventional approach to hydrogen fuel cell system design has been defining the system design point requirements. That is, for a particular energy system the design operating point requirements, such as, hydrogen fuel or power providing capacity for energy based application system, and performance issues, such as, effectiveness or performance coefficient would be specified. The system designer would then decide on selecting hardware components, instrumentation and data acquisition software that would work together in a system to accomplish the required task and meet performance requirements at the design operating point. In this data acquisition and monitoring scheme, the decision to select particular components for the overall system was considered with high importance to avoid system failures. Relevant and competent system modules will be more efficient and save sufficient money over the life of the system to avoid the additional expense and time.

The teaching of the design and implementation of energy systems and the use of data acquisition and monitoring scheme allow the students to consider alternative equipment selections and programming interfaces. The utilization of data acquisition system allows the students or system designers not only to complete a workable system, but also, to obtain a design and implementation system that is optimized based upon a specified design criterion. Furthermore, with the improvement of computer hardware, data acquisition devices and easy to use software, the student can now accomplish much more complex systems. These improvements can take away spending an inconsistent amount of lecture time and effort on the calculations involved in the solution of systems of equations crucial to create energy systems. Many appropriate data acquisition and instrumentation software packages are available. For this work NI LabViewTM virtual instrument to acquire experimental data was found to be a convenient and useful tool. The NI LabViewTM data logging and supervisory control module from National Instruments meet the needs of fuel cell researchers with its built-in high-channel-count data acquisition, data logging,

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Pecen, R. R., & Yildiz, F., & Baltaci, K. (2008, June), Design And Implementation Of A Hydrogen Fuel Cell Data Acquisition And Monitoring Scheme For Educational Institutions Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--3672