Small organic molecules (methanol, ethanol, formic acid etc) are good candidates for fuel cells as transport applications, because of their liquid form at ambient temperature. However, owing to parallel electrochemical reactions, the energetic efficiency of these fuel cells is below the range of acceptability.

These parallel reactions are in general, associated with dynamic instabilities, and the electrode can be driven easily into an oscillatory regime. Experiments of temporal forcing showed that non-stationary operation conditions might result in an overall reaction rate that exceeds the one under stationary conditions. The basic idea of this project is to exploit non-linear spatial effects to increase the yield of a fuel cell.

In a first step, we plan to demonstrate that our main idea can work with a system with "simple chemistry" (a system sufficiently simple to allow a fundamental understanding). In a second year we plan to work with more complicated systems, in order to be able to propose a way to increase the performance of fuel cells.