Modeling of Two-Phase flow in the Cathode Gas Diffusion Layer to Investigate Its Effects on a PEM Fuel Cell

Polymer Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cells are known as the most significant alternatives to internal-combustion engines, but still there is a long way to achieve this idealin reality. To achieve such a goal lots of optimizations are needed to be done on fuel cells. Water management is critical for achieving high performance of PEM fuel cells. In highcurrentdensities, condensed water fills the pores of the Gas Diffusion Layers and thusoxygen transfer to the catalyst layers would be limited. In this study, for the sake of analyzing the PEM fuel cell characteristics and their variations, using the COMSOL software, the twophaseflow regime in PEM fuel cells was simulated. To determine the saturation level in the cathode, a separate differential equation for mass conservation of liquid water was solved and due to the dependencies of other parameters of the mixture on the saturation level, these parameters are determined

Keywords:

PEM Fuel Cell , Fuel Cell modeling , Two-Phase flow