A numerical investigation of reactant transport in a PEM fuel cell with partially blocked gas channels

A review of recent development: Transport and performance modeling of PEM fuel cells

“…Tiss et al [85] presented a two-dimensional single-domain isothermal model to study the mass transport in a PEM fuel cell with partial blocks installed in the flow channel. Their results showed that partial blocks in the gas channel enhance the PEM fuel cell performance because of promoting reactant gas distribution in the gas diffusion layer, and partial blocks obtain a better cell performance with a degree tilt of 4.9°than with a degree tilt of 6.6 and 8.2.…”

Efficient fuel utilization by enhancing the under-rib mass transport using new serpentine flow field designs of direct methanol fuel cells

“…Wang et al [22] approved numerically that, the smaller channel size improves the cell performance by enhancing the species transport toward the porous layer through the promoting of the under-rib convection. Heidary et al [24], Ghanbarian et al [25] and Tiss et al [26] studied the impact of the flow channel blockage on the PEM fuel cell performance. Their results revealed that, the higher blockage of the flow channel led to more under-rib convection species transport, more uniform distribution over the catalyst layer, and in turn higher cell performance.…”

Comparative study of conventional and unconventional designs of cathode flow fields in PEM fuel cell

“…On the other hand, studies have been conducted to develop novel flow fields, either inspired by nature [18,19]; developed with new structures such as metal sheets [20,21] and porous metal foams [6,22,23]; or proposed by various blockage arrangements of parallel flow channel [24][25][26]. Tseng et al [22,27] experimentally showed that both lowtemperature and high-temperature PEM fuel cells perform better with metal foam flow field.…”

“…Placing blocks within flow fields has experimentally and numerically shown to improve the mass transfer of the reactive gases and, accordingly, the overall cell performance [6,25]. Tiss et al [26] studied the impact of the tilt angle of partial blocks present in the flow channels and found out that it significantly impacts the cell performance, especially at low operating voltages. Heidary et al [25] built a multiphase PEMFC model to compare in-line and staggered blocks at the cathode flow channels.…”