Study the Effect of Various Operating Parameters of Proton Exchange Membrane

Abstract

A three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics in-house code to model the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) was developed. The equation was discretized and numerically solved by finite volume method and simple algorithm. In this research some parameters such as oxygen consumption, water production, temperature distribution, ohmic losses, anode water activity, cathode over potential and the fuel cell performance for straight single cell were investigated in more details. The numerical simulations reveal that these important operating parameters are highly dependent to each other and the fuel cell efficiency is affected by the kind of species distribution. So for especial uses in desirable voltages, for preventing from the unwilling losses, these numerical results can be useful. Also at the following an innovative gas flow channel design is introduced which named step-like gas channel. The numerical and experimental results indicate that new flow field design enhance cell performance significantly.
Finally the numerical results of proposed CFD model have been compared with the published experimental data that represent good agreement.