Study on the flooding phenomena and performance enhancement of PEM fuel cell applying a Concus-Finn condition

A nature-inspired solution for water management in flow fields for electrochemical devices

“…Our employed method fits in the first category. Another successful design for fuel cell operation at 100% RH consists of so-called water transport plates (WTPs), 52,53 manufactured by United Technologies Corporation (UTC), whereas other flow-field designs reported in the literature, such as radial, 54 Concus-Finn, 55 parallel serpentine-baffle flow-field, 56 or employing parallel channels with different lengths 57 flood at such high humidity conditions. Further recently reported designs of flow-fields, such as an interdigitated, active drainage flow-field 58 and a porous metal (Ni) foam flow-field 59 are flood prone and exhibit significantly lower performance than our flood-free LUCY flow-field based PEMFC (10 cm 2 , 2 A cm −2 and 700 mW cm −2 ).…”

Liquid water transport and management for fuel cells

“…where 𝜃 𝑤𝑎𝑙𝑙 is the limiting wall contact angle, 𝜃 𝐺𝐷𝐿 is the GDL contact angle and 2𝛼 is the open angle between the channel wall and GDL surface. This relationship can be used to determine the propensity for a channel design to wick water from GDL surfaces for improved water management (80). Results have shown that for typical GDL and hydrophilic flow channels, corner filling will not occur when 𝛼 is 52 or smaller.…”

Interfacial Phenomena and Heat Transfer in Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells

“…These experiments applied a simplified model to mimic the phenomena during an actual fuel cell operation process. Droplets (Ha et al, 2008;Lee et al, 2010;Colosqui et al, 2011;Venkatramana et al, 2009;Han et al, 2012b;David et al, 2012), together with slug, film, and mist flow patterns (Lu et al, 2009;Grimm et al, 2012;Wu and Djilali, 2012), can be obtained through ex situ experiments. Other patterns like annulus (Adroher and Wang, 2011) or intermittent and chaos flow (Chen, 2010), which are not the principal patterns in an operating PEMFC, can also be obtained through ex situ experiments.…”