Modeling and simulation of a new architecure stack applied on the PEM fuel cell

To simulate a new economical architecture for PEM fuel cells and investigate the effectiveness of the introduced structure on the performance, computational  uid dynamics (CFD) code is used to solve the equations for a single domain of the cell namely:  ow  eld, mass conservation, energy conservation, species transport, and electric/ionic  elds under the assumptions of steady state and single phase. In this article, a new architecture of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFCs) stack with typical geometry is presented in which every anode channel is in connection with two cathode channels over the constant length and vice versa. The analyzed numerical results yield to observation the effect of this new structure on distributions like current density oxygen, water, hydrogen mass fraction, current density and temperature. The introduced con guration has the same active area as the base model. The polarization curve for this new cell demonstrates that a straight channel with dual connections ineach channel shows considerably better performance and greatly surpassed the current density region of the polarization curves of a fuel cell using the base structure. The improved model brings several advantages to the conventional PEMFC con guration: suf cient distribution of reactants in the  ow  eld improvement in the concentration distribution along the channels and transport of the reactant gases through the gas diffusion layer (GDL), easy removal of produced water due to a shorter channel, and a lower cost of the PEMFC due to minimizing the total volume of the fuel cell. With regard to the polarization curve, application of this design is strongly recommended to obtain high current density in the operating condition and should be considered in the manufacture of a new generation of PEMFCs for high performance stacks.

Keywords:

Fuel cell , PEM fuel cells , Single-phase , Geometry ,