Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Malta, 16-18 July, 2012.
Proton exchange membrane fuel cell has many distinctive
features that made it an attractive alternative clean energy
source, including low start-up, high power density, high
efficiency, portability and remote applications. Commercial
application of this energy source had been greatly hindered by
series of technical issues ranging from inadequate water and
heat management, intolerance to impurities such as CO, slow
electrochemical kinetics at electrodes, and relatively high cost.
An approach to stem the thermal build-up within the fuel cell
structure that could lead to degradation of the system
components is by integrating cooling channels as part of flow
structure of the PEM fuel cell system. In this study, a numerical
investigation was carried out to investigate the impact of
cooling channel geometry in combination with temperature
dependent operating parameters on thermal management and
overall performance of a PEM fuel cell system. The evaluation
is performed using a CFD code based on a finite volume
approach. The systems net power and polarization curves are
presented as a function of the system temperature, operating
parameters and geometry. In addition, the parameters studied
were optimized using a mathematical optimization code
integrated with the commercial computational fluid dynamics
code.
