Sir William Grove created the first fuel cell in 1839. It wasn’t until 1950, however, that another British scientist, Sir Francis Bacon, demonstrated the fuel cell’s practical use in a fuel cell stack. It was the magic of chemistry created in this stacking of fuel cells that allowed them to win out over other competing power systems when NASA was looking to increase the duration of manned space flights. NASA even called their first fuel cells Bacon Cells in honor of Sir Francis Bacon. The fuel cell’s early success in NASA’s manned space flights allowed fuel cell technology to literally “take off” in the 1960’s. Many of the types of fuel cells that we have today were spawned out of the R&D done by NASA in the 1960s as variants of the Bacon Cell concept.
One of the fuel cell types developed out of the R&D done by NASA, the PEM fuel cell, continues to Continue reading “Fuel Cells 101 – Learning The Basics”