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Conflict of Interest: In relation to this article, we declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Publication history: Received March 6, 2006
Accepted December 23, 2006

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Effect of the geometry and pattern of the flow channel on the performance of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell

Kronkanok Hongthong Kejvalee Pruksathorn Pornpote Piumsomboon^† Paiboon Sripakagorn¹

Fuels Research Center, Department of Chemical Technology, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Korea ¹Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Korea

pornpote.p@chula.ac.th

Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering, July 2007, 24(4), 612-617(6), 10.1007/s11814-007-0012-z

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Abstract

This research focuses on the effect of the geometry and patterns of the gas flow channel on the PEM fuel cell performance. Simulation was conducted and the results were verified by experiments. Three-dimensional, single phase, compressible and isothermal models of 5 cm2 electrodes, anode and cathode, were developed and studied by utilizing a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, FLUENT 4.5. Two types of gas flow channel were investigated: conventional and interdigitated. The results showed that the flow channel pattern does not have a significant effect on the anode cell performance, whereas it has a strong effect/influence on the cathode cell performance. The interdigitated design provides a higher limiting current density and cell performance than the conventional design on the cathode side. Moreover, the cell performance does not depend on the inlet and outlet channel widths. On the contrary, for the interdigitated design, it was influenced by the shoulder width. Finally, experiments were conducted to validate the simulation results.

Keywords

Flow Channel Pattern PEM Fuel Cell Modeling FLUENT

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