Micromachined methanol steam reforming system as a hydrogen supplier for portable proton exchange membrane fuel cells

In this paper, a novel hydrogen-supplying device for fuel cells has been designed, fabricated, and demonstrated. The proposed hydrogen supplier is a micromachined one-chip fuel processing system including vaporizer, catalytic combustor and methanol steam reformer. This fuel processing system utilizes the thermal energy generated from the catalytic hydrogen combustion to heat up the entire system. For the catalytic combustion, we have introduced carbon nanotubes as a supporting structure of Pt catalyst for the first time. We have also developed a new coating method of reforming catalyst (Cu/ZnO/Al₂O₃) and observed that adequate amount of hydrogen can be generated for PEM fuel cells. We have successfully reported the feasibility of the proposed fuel processing system.