Question:
What are the key testing requirements that a fuel cell engineer looks at?

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The engineers look at hardness, stress and strain on the different components, pressure, and the reformer temperature; those are the kinds of things that are measured for fuels. You also look at vibration, noise, emissions, exhaust emissions, NOX, SOX, particulate matter, reactive organic gases, free methane, CO², even carbon monoxide, all different criteria. You also want to look at flow rate or mass flow over a period of time. You need to measure the energy content in the fuel, in other words the BTUs in the natural gas or the hydrogen.

Question:
Yokogawa, of course, makes test equipment and we've been selling into fuel cell development applications. What advice could you give us as far as what products or product features would be required from the testing industry?

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It's very important now to know what effects different loads and load changes have on the fuel cells. Fuel cell manufacturers must make sure their fuel cells are capable of delivering reliable power regardless of the load. So load characterization is one key parameter to measure.Fuel cells are very similar to photovoltaics (PV). The fuel cell itself is a DC source and so it goes to an inverter, and the inverter is fairly standard technology. But the DC input may not be the same as the PV panel. There is more and more attention being applied to inverters to try and get higher efficiencies out of them by fine-tuning their design. There's nothing particularly unique about fuel cells that make them difficult to monitor, though there are many unique things involved in inverters such as the harmonics and the various waveforms that people are very interested in during R&D testing.

Thank you very much for speaking us today. We hope that we'll see a commercialized fuel cell product in the near future, and that we can help in the development by providing fuel cell-specific measuring instruments.
Interviewer: Mr. Brad Byrum, Yokogawa Corporation of America, Test & Measurement Div.