Microstructure Reconstruction and Characterization of the Porous GDLs for PEMFC Based on Fibers Orientation Distribution

Abstract

The 3D microstructure of the gas diffusion layers (GDLs) is generated, using a stochastic reconstruction approach. The method uses basic input parameters and fibers orientation distribution and is capable to model carbon fiber and binder phases of all types of carbon fiber GDLs with different structural parameters. Morphological operators of image processing are used to add the binder to the fibrous skeleton in three dimensions. Binder impregnation, pore size distribution and tortuosity factor of the reconstructed GDL are evaluated and compared with literature. Twenty and forty percentages of binder volume fraction are used to reconstruct the microstructure. To further investigate the reliability of our approach, mass transport properties of the reconstructed microstructure, namely absolute permeability, effective diffusivity of the pore space and effective thermal conductivity, are investigated through a finite volume equation solver in AVIZO. Only 4% of discrepancy between the absolute permeability calculation and the value reported by the manufacturer is observed in the through‐plane direction. Finally, in order to show the flexibility of the methodology the microstructure of a commercial Toray GDL is also reconstructed and characterized. The proposed method is proved to be a high‐speed and versatile tool for research and development in the GDL material design.

Two-phase flow and oxygen transport in the perforated gas diffusion layer of proton exchange membrane fuel cell

“…When D changes from 100 lm to 150 lm, the liquid level increases slightly. The observation for D = 25 lm may be due to the fact that the pores in carbon paper can be as large as 20-40 lm [52,58]. As a result, the small perforation, i.e.…”

“…Except the case D = 25 lm, the other three perforations considerably reduce the lm. This is because most pores in the carbon paper is among 20-40 lm [52,58], a small perforation, e.g. 25 lm has little changes on the GDL morphology, thereby reduces the liquid water level slightly.…”

Advanced Laguerre Tessellation for the Reconstruction of Ceramic Foams and Prediction of Transport Properties

“…The pore size distribution (PSD) is usually considered a more significant structural parameter than the total porosity [34]. The most popular experimental techniques employed in the literature to characterize the pore size distribution are mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP) [35] and capillary flow porometry [36].…”

Effective Diffusion in Fibrous Porous Media: A Comparison Study between Lattice Boltzmann and Pore Network Modeling Methods

“…The generated mesh was later imported into the commercial computer fluid dynamics (CFD) solver Fluent. Stochastic 3D fibrous models were also constructed and numerically studied in similar works [ 17 , 18 ] using different software AVIZO (FEI, Waltham, MA, USA) [ 18 ] and OpenFOAM (ESI, Paris, France) [ 19 ]).…”