Laboratory and Equipment

This 1,500 sq. ft. laboratory, directed by Dr. Ahn, is well equipped to carry out the combustion and energy research and facilitates testing and characterization of membranes, fuel cells, batteries, and combustors. The entire ventilation system is a once through system, so there is no recirculation of gases. The laboratory also has special ventilated fireproof gas cabinets for storage of explosive gases and an exhaust system to remove any explosive gases in the exit lines.

This laboratory is equipped with a wide variety of state-of-the-art instruments including two chemical fume hoods, gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS), infrared camera, digital power supply, digital multimeter, oscilloscopes, and computerized Labview-based facilities for accurate partial pressure gas mixing and steady flow metering. Temperatures are monitored with the same application. PCs are available for data acquisition and control and workstations are available for data processing.

This laboratory is also equipped to fabricate the membranes, fuel cells, and batteries. This laboratory has high temperature furnaces, pressing machines, stainless steel die, tape caster, laminator, oven with digital temperature controller, tabletop coating system with ultrasonic spraying system, piston extruder, mixer, stirrer, drilling/milling machine, potentiostat, viscometer, impedance analyzer, and other supplementary equipment needed for the fabrication. The performances of fuel cells and batteries are tested using an available power source meter also running under Labview. Multitasking multi-processor workstations are available for running this software and for conducting the modeling studies. FLUENT computational fluid dynamics software and multi-processor workstations are available for modeling of chemical reactions, heat transfer and fluid flows.