Experimental analysis on heat recovery from a peme stack: Exploring operating temperatures and integration aspects

This study investigates the impact of operating temperature in a real case PEME on the heat recovery process and, in particular, critical parameters such as hydrogen production efficiency, the quantity of generated heat and the specific power consumption.Moreover, it presents experimental polarization curves for a PEME stack consisting of 45 cells across a range of operating temperatures (30°C, 40°C, 50°C, 60°C, 70°C, 80°C), which are essential to conduct analyses on the PEME stack under heat recovery.Furthermore, an analysis is conducted to assess the effectiveness of utilizing the heat generated by the PEME stack at various operating temperatures integrated with heat pumps for supplying district heating (DH) networks.As a result of the study, while the quantity of generated heat by PEME stack is higher in a lower operating temperature, from a hydrogen production point of view, higher operating temperatures are recommended to achieve an optimal operation for the PEME stack.Moreover, the analysis reveals that the integrated heat pump has a higher COP when the PEME stack operates at a higher temperature and identifies 60 °C as an optimal operating temperature for the PEME stack in which the integrated heat pump achieves its highest COP of 3.17, and the hydrogen production efficiency and heat generation efficiency are 66.6% and 33%, respectively, for the PEME stack at full load.