Investigation of Ship Vibration Effects on the Gas Distribution and Output Voltage of a Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell

Abstract

The effects of ship vibrations on the mass transfer and performance of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) have many vague aspects. Hence, the method of loading ship vibrations with the sliding mesh is first proposed in this paper. Furthermore, this method is adopted to form the solution of the simulation study of PEMFC performance under ship vibrations. In the framework of computational fluid dynamics, the ship vibration is loaded into the three-dimensional PEMFC model and successfully solved. Then, a series of special cases are performed to explore the gas distribution and output features of PEMFCs in ship environments with different vibrations. Finally, the results show that the ship vibrations have vectorial effects on the gas transfer in the PEMFC. Additionally, vibrations perpendicular to the channel evidently affect the gas transfer. Moreover, while the vibrations are parallel to the channel, they remain nearly normal. Relatively, a more significant influence on the output voltage of the PEMFC will occur under smaller frequencies and/or greater amplitudes of ship vibrations.

Numerical and Experimental Investigation of Performance and Flooding Phenomena of a PEM Fuel Cell with and without Micro-Porous Layers

“…Another point of interest is that the published works of other authors [20][21][22][23][24] often consider GDL without MPLs when modeling with the ANSYS PEM Fuel Cell module. Our study highlighted this issue by adding MPLs.…”

“…A final novelty is that oxygen was used in this study as an oxidizing agent when modeling with the ANSYS PEM Fuel Cell module, which typically uses air as an oxidizer [20][21][22][23][24]. The use of oxygen requires certain representations of the input data.…”

“…Based on the physical model (Figure 1), a numerical model of PEMFC was created in the ANSYS. The geometric and mesh models (Figure 3) was built from about 7.4•10 6 elements and underwent many adjustments to obtain the desired convergence based on the meshing techniques mentioned in [20][21][22][23][24]. The simulation settings for the unsteady coefficients are pressure of 0.7, momentum of 0.3, and species of 0.95.…”