A new modified-serpentine flow field for application in high temperature polymer electrolyte fuel cell

Abstract

Flow field design for the distribution of reactants and products on the electrode surface plays an important role in the overall performance of the fuel cell. It acts as a crucial factor when the laboratory scale fuel cell is scaled up for commercial applications. In the present work, a novel flow field design is proposed and its usefulness for the fuel cell applications are evaluated in a high-temperature polymer electrolyte fuel cell. The proposed geometry retains some of the features of serpentine flow field such as multiple bends, while modifications are made in its inplane flow path to achieve comparatively uniform reactant and product distribution. A threedimensional CFD model is developed to analyze the effectiveness of the proposed flow field. An HT-PEFC is fabricated and experimented with the proposed flow field for experimental validation. Furthermore, a low-cost current distribution mapping device is developed to validate the current density distribution on the electrode obtained from the CFD model. It exhibits a mismatch of 4% in the spatial distribution of current density between the modelling and experimental results. The proposed design is capable of achieving higher uniformity in current distribution across the active area (0.998 for modified serpentine and 0.96 serpentine) compared to serpentine flow field. This aids in boosting the current density of the cell by 27% at 0.57 V operations.

Impact of Thickness of Polymer Electrolyte Membrane and Gas Diffusion Layer on Temperature Distributions in Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cell Operated at Temperature around 90 °C

“…(1)-(3) that H react is higher when W E , i.e., the power generation performance, is smaller, resulting that T react is higher according to Eq. (15). In addition, another reason might be that the condensation heat of accumulated water also contributed to the rise of the temperature.…”

Radial Flow Field of Circular Bipolar Plate for Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells

“…Vazifeshenas et al [9] conducted a 3D simulation of a composite flow field, which retains the serpentine design and excels it in many aspects. Singdeo et al [10] proposed a multi-channel serpentine cross flow field, in which the reactant density varies between adjacent channels, and proved that the cross-diffusion improves the uniformity of gas distribution. In fact, multi-channel serpentine channel has been widely adopted thanks to its flexibility and applicability.…”

Numerical Analysis of Different Multi‐serpentine Flow Fields for Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells

“…The simulation results indicated that the design is beneficial to water removal. Singdeo et al proposed a new modified multi‐serpentine flow field for high‐temperature polymer electrolyte fuel cells. Their modified flow field has enhanced the uniformity of current distribution over the active area compared to the conventional multi‐serpentine flow field.…”

“…As known that the modified multi‐serpentine flow field proposed by Singdeo et al is helpful to improving the distribution uniformity of reactant gas and current density, but they did not carry out detailed analysis. In this work, we presented two compensated flow fields, termed separated serpentine flow field and combined serpentine flow field following their designing principle.…”