Investigation of water evolution and transport in fuel cells with high resolution synchrotron x-ray radiography

Abstract

Articles you may be interested inAn evaluation of high energy bremsstrahlung background in point-projection x-ray radiography experimentsa) Rev. Sci. Instrum. 83, 10E528 (2012); 10.1063/1.4738649 High-energy, high-resolution x-ray imaging on the Trident short-pulse laser facilitya) Rev. Sci. Instrum. 79, 10E905 (2008); 10.1063/1.2965012Cross-sectional insight in the water evolution and transport in polymer electrolyte fuel cellsThe authors report on in situ investigations of liquid water evolution and transport in an undisturbed operating fuel cell at the microscopic level. Synchrotron x-ray radiography enhances the spatial resolution by two orders of magnitude compared to the state-of-the-art techniques in this field. The primary spots of liquid water formation, their growth, and transport inside the porous gas diffusion material were analyzed; correlations between operating conditions and the dynamics of droplet formation are described. Previous findings from modeling and simulation approaches are confirmed and the applicability for the description of in situ processes of a recently proposed model has been proven.

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

“…To account for the effects of the ribs and channels, an effective DM-length multiplier for a rib-to-channel ratio of 1:1 is used (i.e., 1.6x) as described by Weber [88]. Furthermore, the interface between the flowfield gas channel and the GDL can become controlling and is complex [37,47,83,89], although by examining only steady-state behavior, the transient and droplet aspects can be more-or-less ignored.…”

“…In addition to ex-situ analyses, neutron [42][43][44][45] and other imaging techniques [46][47][48][49] have begun to allow one to see the in-situ DM water profiles with increasingly better resolution.…”

3D analysis, modeling and simulation of transport processes in compressed fibrous microstructures, using the Lattice Boltzmann method

“…They studied pore size distributions but also size, shape and orientation of the pores. Many groups concentrate their investigations on liquid water transport [10,11] because this is a key functionality of the GDL when PEFCs are operated below 100 • C.…”

Influence of threshold variation on determining the properties of a polymer electrolyte fuel cell gas diffusion layer in X-ray nano-tomography

“…For fuel cell flow simulation in a porous layer and pore analysis, representative binary models are required which define the internal solid-void boundaries in a GDL structure. Therefore, it is necessary to threshold the greyscale images acquired from X-ray tomography in order to produce binary images (Manke et al, 2007;Feser et al, 2006;Hung et al, 2008).…”