A Formic Acid Air-Breathing Microfluidic Fuel Cell Feeding with a Single Stream

In the search of improve the performance of the microfluidic fuel cell, air-breathing microfluidic fuel cell (ABµFC) has emerged as interesting solution; this fuel cell increase the quantity of oxygen reaching the cathode taking the oxygen of the air through a porous material increasing the global performance of the fuel cell. Also, in literature has been reported the use of one stream of fuel-oxygen to reduce the complexity of the fuel cell, allowing simpler and low-cost designs. In this work is proposed the construction and evaluation of an operated with only one stream of formic acid in acid media. The ABµFC is operated with one feed flow contents 0.1, 0.5 and 1 M formic acid achieving similar power density values using commercial Pt/C (near to 80%) and AuPd/C (near to 99%) as cathodes in comparison with the counterparts feeding with two streams (fuel and electrolyte). These results are promising towards the development of simpler designs of ABµFC.