Modeling and simulation of a new architecure stack applied on the PEM Fuel Cell

Abstract

To simulate a new economical architecture for PEM fuel cell and investigate the effectiveness of the introduced structure on the performance, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code is used to solve the equations for a single domain of the cell namely: the flow field, the mass conservation, the energy conservation, the species transport, and the electric/ionic fields under the assumptions of steady state and single phase. In this article, a new architecture of proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFCs) stack with typical geometry is presented in which every anode channel is in connection with two cathode channel in the constant length and vice versa. The analyzed numerical results yield to observation the effect of this new structure on the distributions like current density oxygen, water, hydrogen mass fraction, current density and temperature. The introduced configuration has the same active area as the base model. Drawing the polarization curve for this new cell demonstrates that straight channel with dual connection in each channel shows considerably better performance and surpassed by a large amount the current density region of the polarization curves of a fuel cell using the base structure. The improved model can bring several advantages to the conventional PEMFC configuration which associated to the sufficient distribution of the reactants, to the flow field, improvement the concentration distribution along the channels and transport of the reactant gases through the gas diffusion layer (GDL), . <br />.