Numerical study of effect of design and physical parameters on a PEM fuel cell performance

Abstract

Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Mauritius, 11-13 July, 2011.

A proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell is one of the widely researched fuel cell systems due to its low temperature operation, high power density, fast start-up, system robustness and low emission characteristics. A three-dimensional numerical computation of the effect of design parameters (geometry and flow orientation) and physical parameters (gas diffusion layer porosity) on PEM fuel cell performance was carried out. The continuity, momentum, energy and species conservation equations describing the flow and species transport of the gas mixture in the coupled gas channels and the electrodes were numerically solved using a computational fluid dynamics code. This paper investigated how channel geometries (width and depth), flow orientation and gas diffusion layer (GDL) porosity affect performance and species distribution in a typical fuel cell system. The study also incorporated pressure drop characteristics in the flow channel. The numerical results computed agree well with experimental data in the literature.