SERC Designs Test Station

Staff members at Humboldt State University’s Schatz Energy Research Center (SERC) in Arcata, California, have designed and built a fuel cell testing station.

On November 1, the station was showcased at an informal ceremony with Congressman Mike Thompson (D-CA), whose support helped SERC obtain the $500,000 grant for the center’s “Fuel-Cell Advanced Materials Research and Demonstration Project” from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Anchored to a lab bench at SERC’s University Annex facility, the station – a network of wires, hoses and pipes connected to motors, gauges, tanks and valves – allows the fuel cell’s traffic of electricity, water and gases to be monitored.

Since SERC built its first fuel cell in 1992 (to power aquaria pumps at the university’s marine laboratory), the center has produced an array of stacks, ranging from 200 watts to 9kW, providing energy for various uses across the state. Past SERC stacks have powered a small fleet of vehicles for the City of Palm Desert, a mountaintop radio repeater station to provide telecommunications to a remote region of Northern California, and an ice-cream maker in a project for schoolchildren in Santa Cruz.

SERC also has a $200,000 contract to build a similar fuel-cell test station for Kettering University in Michigan.