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The study investigates the effect of flow channel design on PEM fuel cell performance, finding that narrower channels improve performance at low currents and larger cross-sectional areas improve performance at high currents.

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What they did

System
MFC

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Abstract

The flow channel is very important to the performance of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), it is believed that the PEM fuel cell performance is greatly affected by the flow patterns besides the operating temperature, gas inlet humidity, and so on [1,2,3]. The channel or rib width and channel cross-sectional area determine the pressure drop, thus directly influence on the water removal, and then affect the oxygen supply and oxygen reduction reaction. In this study, two flow pattern, four different channel designs are investigated mainly by three-dimensional simulation, effects of different design on cell performance are validated by the experiments. After analyzing the differences between the four kinds of flow channels, the situations of current density distribution, water distribution and oxygen distribution in the cell are studied and the performance are analyzed. We found out how the flow channel width and cross sectional area on the performance of PEM fuel cell: the narrower the width is, the better the cell’s performance is when current is low. The larger the cross sectional area is, the better the cell’s performance is when current is high. Acknowledgements This work was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 21533005) and Science Foundation of Ministry of Education of China ( Grant No. 413064). References [1] Bonghwan Lee, Kiwon Park and Hyung-Man Kim. Numerical Optimization of Flow Field Pattern by Mass Transfer and Electrochemical Reaction Characteristics in Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells[J]. Int.J. Electrochem. Sci., 8 (2013) 219 – 234 [2] A. Arvay, J. French, J.-C. Wanga, X.-H. Peng, A.M. Kannan. Nature inspired flow field designs for proton exchange membrane fuel cell[J]International Journal of Hydrogen Energy 38(2013):3717-3726 [3] Sungho Lee, Heeseok Jeong, Byungki Ahn, Taewon Lim, Youngjin Son. Parametric study of the channel design at the bipolar plate in PEMFC performances[J].International journal of hydrogen energy 33 ( 2008 ) 5691–5696 Figure 1

Key findings

  • Narrower flow channel widths improve PEM fuel cell performance at low current densities.
  • Larger flow channel cross-sectional areas improve PEM fuel cell performance at high current densities.
  • The flow channel design significantly affects water removal, oxygen supply, and oxygen reduction reaction in PEM fuel cells.

Keywords

Proton exchange membrane fuel cellPressure dropCurrent (fluid)Flow (mathematics)Current densityFuel cells

Identifiers

DOI
10.1149/ma2017-01/22/1133
Journal
ECS Meeting Abstracts
Year
2017