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Design and simulation of novel flow field plate geometry for proton exchange membrane fuel cells

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Abstract

Bipolar plate is one of the many important components of proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) stacks as it supplies fuel and oxidant to the membrane-electrode assembly (MEA), removes water, collects produced current and provides mechanical support for the single cells in the stack. The flow field design of a bipolar plate greatly affects the performance of a PEMFC. It must uniformly distribute the reactant gases over the MEA and prevent product water flooding. This paper aims at improving the fuel cell performance by optimizing flow field designs and flow channel configurations. To achieve this, a novel biomimetic flow channel for flow field designs is proposed based on Murray’s Law. Computational fluid dynamics based simulations were performed to compare three different designs (parallel, serpentine and biomimetic channel, respectively) in terms of current density distribution, power density distribution, pressure distribution, temperature distribution, and hydrogen mass fraction distribution. It was found that flow field designs with biomimetic flow channel perform better than that with convectional flow channel under the same operating conditions.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the National Science Foundation of China (Grant Numbers: 51575413 and 51305315) for funding this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Material Science and Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, 430070, China

    Hanxia Ruan

  2. School of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, 430070, China

    Chaoqun Wu, Shuliang Liu & Tao Chen

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  1. Hanxia Ruan
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  2. Chaoqun Wu
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  3. Shuliang Liu
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  4. Tao Chen
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Correspondence to Chaoqun Wu.

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Ruan, H., Wu, C., Liu, S. et al. Design and simulation of novel flow field plate geometry for proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Heat Mass Transfer 52, 2167–2176 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00231-015-1737-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00231-015-1737-6

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