Design of a Double-Ejector Oxygen Recirculated System for Large-Scale Submarine Fuel Cell Available to Purchase

In terms of the system efficiency, it is very useful to apply the ejector into the fuel recirculation system of a fuel cell system since the ejector need no parasitic power to operate. Since the conventional automotive fuel cell use hydrogen and air as their fuel, the only hydrogen is needed to be recirculated for the better fuel efficiency. On the other hand, the submarine fuel cell needs both hydrogen and oxygen recirculation systems because the submarine drives under the sea. In particular, the cathodic recirculation has to meet the tougher target since the oxygen based pressurized stack generally used in the submarine applications generates the significant amount of the water in the stack during the operation. Namely, the oxygen utilization has designed less than 50% in the whole operating range for the better exhausting of the generated waters. The target of the oxygen utilization forces that the entrainment ratio of the ejector to be more than one in the whole range. However, the conventional ejector using a constant nozzle can not afford to satisfy the mentioned critical requirement. To overcome the problem, the double-ejector and its control strategy are designed. The performance of the proposed double-ejector is verified by the experiments based on the real operating conditions of the target submarine system. Furthermore, the proposed design method can be used for the other fuel recirculation system of a large-scale fuel cell system with the critical requirement of the fuel utilization.