Membraneless Fuel Cell

A membraneless fuel cell converts stored chemical energy into electricity without the conducting membrane that separates the fuel and oxidant streams in most other fuel cell designs. One version, the laminar flow fuel cell, exploits the fact that two liquid streams flowing side by side at small enough scale do not mix, so the interface between the non-mixing flows itself acts as the proton or ion conductor a membrane would otherwise provide; because this effect depends on laminar flow, such cells can only be built at millimeter scale, which limits their use to small portable applications. A second version, the mixed reactant fuel cell, instead delivers fuel and electrolyte together as a single mixed stream and relies on the electrodes themselves, rather than any membrane or flow geometry, to keep the oxidation and reduction reactions separate, which removes the laminar flow size limit and can make the resulting system simpler and less costly than a conventional membrane-based fuel cell.