Demonstration of Fast Simultaneous Neutron and X-Ray Tomography for Fuel Cell Water Content Measurements

Neutron radiography has been a powerful tool for measuring water content within operating fuel cells. The resolution for neutron imaging has been steadily improving and has demonstrated the ability to measure water content in industrially relevant catalyst layers. The difficulty in measuring catalyst layer or interfacial water content with neutron radiography is that the method assumes that the layers of the MEA are flat and uniform with no variation which is a poor assumption. To combat this assumption, it is necessary to move to neutron tomography that resolves the fuel cell in three dimensions. Combining neutron tomography with simultaneous X-ray tomography improves layer and interface identification which facilitates better water saturation measurements. In addition to capturing the “waviness” of the MEA, this method can be applied to tracking water distribution in structured 3D electrodes. This talk will demonstrate current developments in fast simultaneous neutron and X-ray tomography, methods to improve saturation calculations within the various porous layers, and showcase new hardware developments available to the NIST user community.