TY - JOUR
T1 - Effects of cathode gas channel design on air-cooled proton exchange membrane fuel cell performance
AU - Peng, Ming
AU - Chen, Li
AU - Gong, Kunying
AU - Tao, Wen quan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023
PY - 2024/1/5
Y1 - 2024/1/5
N2 - In the study, the impact of cathode gas channel (CGC) structure on the operation of air-cooled PEMFCs is investigated by a multiphase nonisothermal model. First, the influences of tapered channel configuration on the distribution of key variable distributions are studied. The distributions of these variables are found to be coupled with the reactive transport process within the catalyst layer (CL). The variation of local current density is found to be positively correlated with the dissolved water content. Although the tapered channel design can improve the current density, the weight of the bipolar plates (BPs) will be inevitably increased. Finally, the trapezoidal channel design is proposed aiming at improving the performance without increase of fuel cell weight. Several performance indexes are employed to comprehensively evaluate the different CGC designs, and the results demonstrate that the inverted trapezoidal CGC design, with which good thermal and water management are achieved, presents the best performance among the different CGC designs studied, leading to 18.9 % increase of the mass power density and 18.6 % increase of volume power density compared with the base case design.
AB - In the study, the impact of cathode gas channel (CGC) structure on the operation of air-cooled PEMFCs is investigated by a multiphase nonisothermal model. First, the influences of tapered channel configuration on the distribution of key variable distributions are studied. The distributions of these variables are found to be coupled with the reactive transport process within the catalyst layer (CL). The variation of local current density is found to be positively correlated with the dissolved water content. Although the tapered channel design can improve the current density, the weight of the bipolar plates (BPs) will be inevitably increased. Finally, the trapezoidal channel design is proposed aiming at improving the performance without increase of fuel cell weight. Several performance indexes are employed to comprehensively evaluate the different CGC designs, and the results demonstrate that the inverted trapezoidal CGC design, with which good thermal and water management are achieved, presents the best performance among the different CGC designs studied, leading to 18.9 % increase of the mass power density and 18.6 % increase of volume power density compared with the base case design.
KW - Air-cooled PEMFCs
KW - Dissolved water in ionomer
KW - Gas channel design
KW - Mass power density
KW - Water and thermal management
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85172147823&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2023.121614
DO - 10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2023.121614
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85172147823
SN - 1359-4311
VL - 236
JO - Applied Thermal Engineering
JF - Applied Thermal Engineering
M1 - 121614
ER -