Direct measurement of through-plane thermal conductivity and contact resistance in fuel cell materials

Thermal Conductivity and Contact Resistance of Compressed Gas Diffusion Layer of PEM Fuel Cell

“…The κ GDL (h) obtained here is approximately four times higher than the reported value (0.3 W m -1 K -1 at approximately 2 MPa) [23,49,50]. This difference is probably due to the fact that in the previous study, the contribution of R c,GDL/GDL (h) was simply neglected in calculation of κ GDL (h) [49] or R b,GDL (h) was not properly derived from the measured temperature gap [23].…”

“…To the authors' knowledge, only few experimental assessments of the thermal properties of cell components in sufficient detail have been carried out, e.g. by Khandelwal and Mench [49], and Vie and Kjelstrup [50]. Since it was thought that the thermal properties depended on the compression pressure, further study of compression effect on them was warranted.…”

Improved modeling and understanding of diffusion-media wettability on polymer-electrolyte-fuel-cell performance

“…Two terms are used each for the GDL and MPL PSDs; the values are given in Table I. The total PSD of the composite structure can be calculated from the individual layer PSDs by [67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76] …”

“…concentrations. Second, the above analysis has ignored a couple of issues such as GDL anisotropies [68,84,85] and compression [8,86,87], which can somewhat be accounted for by using average properties and capillary pressure -saturation curves measured under operating-type conditions. Overall, the above methodology allows for one to go beyond simple curve fits and thus can provide educated guesses to the impact of various properties.…”

Computation of Thermal Conductivity of Gas Diffusion Layers of PEM Fuel Cells

“…Experimental results have shown that an increase of PTFE loading leads to a reduction of through-plane thermal conductivity (Khandelwal & Mench, 2006;Burheim et al, 2011) in several, but not all types of gas diffusion layers (see Table 2). 4.6 -13.9 bar compression dry GDL ex situ unidirectional heat flux and measuring temperature difference (Burheim et al, 2011) Toray carbon paper, Quintech, thickness 280 μm 0 0.33 -0.59 estimate based on experiment ex situ unidirectional heat flux and measuring temperature difference (Ramousse et al, 2008) 0.62 -0.89 4.6 -13.9 bar compression dry GDL 5 1.4 4.6 -13.9 bar compression residual water ex situ unidirectional heat flux and measuring temperature difference (Burheim et al, 2011) Assuming that the structure of the GDL remains unchanged, one would expect that the addition of material that has a higher thermal conductivity than air -like PTFE -should increase the overall thermal conductivity.…”