Achievement

Eric Peterson has been working at the intersection of management and engineering, and this has been facilitated by the IGERT focus on interdisciplinary research. He has discovered while in researching key players and their market announcements relative to alternative energy vehicles that a significant advance for Honda in moving from their prototype-only FCX to their limited-production FCX Clarity was because of introduction of their so-called ‘VFlow Fuel Cell.’ This turns out to be a vertical mechanical arrangement of the bipolar plates in the FC stack, and laying out the flow field so that the cathode will shed H2O by gravity, thereby controlling membrane flooding. While a simple example, it has led to several lines of inquiry - ranging from questioning the systems-level maturity of this industry leader, to contrasting the purpose-built FCX Clarity as a FC platform with the retrofit of FC technology into existing mechanical platforms.