The objective of this work is to develop advanced microstructure analysis tools for direct quantification of the key structural properties of complex fuel cell materials. Computationally efficient algorithms have been developed to extract the key structural parameters from measured microstructure datasets of these materials. In addition to determination of the traditional structural measures (e.g., porosity, surface area, phase connectivity), two novel microstructure analysis techniques are introduced for the quantification of pore size and tortuosity distributions. For initial demonstration purposes, the methods developed are applied to a digitally reconstructed sample of the micro-porous layer (MPL) of a polymer electrolyte fuel cell (PEFC). The results produced from these analyses are compared to previously reported experimental and model-derived values where applicable.
The objective of this work is to utilize the recent advances in microstructure quantification to select small volumes (referred to as representative volume elements, or "RVEs") for use in pore scale modeling, which accurately reflect the overall microstructure and transport properties of large fuel cell material datasets. The micro-porous layer (MPL) of polymer electrolyte fuel cells is chosen for demonstration. Focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy is utilized to obtain a 3-D structural dataset for the selected MPL sample. Using n-point statistics, RVEs are selected from the full dataset to reflect the ensemble averaged statistics of the full dataset to within acceptable tolerance. Metric comparisons between RVEs and the full dataset indicate that the selected RVEs offer a very good representation of the full dataset, albeit in a volume that is significantly smaller in spatial extent, therefore providing a computationally efficient and reliable model domain for pore-scale modeling efforts.
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