• Journal of the Korean Electrochemical Society
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.39-45
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• 2013

The water management is one of the key issues in low operating temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). The gas diffusion layer (GDL) allows the reactant gases flow to the reaction sites of the catalyst layer (CL). At high current density, generated water forms droplets because the normal operating temperature is $60{\sim}80^{\circ}C$. If liquid water is not evacuated properly, the pores in the GDL will be blocked and the performance will be reduced severely. In this study, the microchannel GDL was proposed to solve the flooding problem. The liquid water transport through 3-D constructed conventional GDL and microchannel GDL was analyzed varying air velocity, water velocity, and contact angle. The simulation results showed that the liquid water was evacuated rapidly through the microchannel GDL because of the lower flow resistance. Therefore, the microchannel GDL was efficient to remove liquid water in the GDL and gas channels.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2010.11a
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• pp.76.1-76.1
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• 2010

Recently, many efforts to solve the durability problem of PEM fuel cell are carried on constantly. However, despite this attention, durability researches of gas diffusion layer (GDL) are not much reported yet. Generally, GDL of PEM fuel cell experiences three external attacks, which are dissolution of water, erosion of gas flow, corrosion of electric potential. In this study, among these degradation factors, carbon corrosion of electric potential was focused and investigated with accelerated carbon corrosion test. Through the test, it is confirmed that carbon corrosion occurred at GDL, and corroded GDL decreased a performance of operating fuel cell. The property changes of GDL were measured with various methods such as air permeability meter, pore distribution analyzer, thermo gravimetric analyzer, and tensile stress test to discover the effects of carbon corrosion. Carbon corrosion caused not only loss of weight and thickness, but also degradation of mechanical strength of GDL. In addition, to analysis the reason of GDL property changes, a surface and a cross section of GDL were observed with scanning electron microscope. After 100 hours test, the GDL showed serious damage in center of layer.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.50 no.3
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• pp.556-561
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• 2012

In this study, the effect of properties of gas diffusion layer (GDL) on the performance of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) was investigated using the numerical simulation. The multi-phase mixture ($M^2$) model was used to calculate liquid water saturation and oxygen concentration in GDL. GDL properties, which were contact angle, porosity, gas permeability and thickness, were changed to investigate the effect of GDL properties on the performance of PEMFC. The results demonstrated that performance of PEMFC was increased with increasing contact angle and porosity of GDL, but decreased with increasing thickness of GDL. The liquid water saturation was decreased but oxygen concentration was increased at the GDL-catalyst layer interface, because the mass transfer resistance decreased as the porosity and contact angle increased. On the other hands, as the thickness of GDL increased, pathway for liquid water and oxygen gas became longer, and then mass transfer resistance increased. For this reason, performance of PEMFC decreased with increasing thickness of GDL.

• 한국전산유체공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2011.05a
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• pp.46-53
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• 2011

Water is continuously produced in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC), and is transported and exhausted through polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM), catalyst layer (CL), microporous layer (MPL), and gas diffusion layer (GDL). The low operation temperatures of PEMFC lead to the condensation of water, and the condensed water hinders the transport of reactants in porous layers (MPL and GDL). Thus, water flooding is currently one of hot issues that should be solved to achieve higher performance of PEMFC. This research aims to study liquid water transport in porous layers of PEMFC by using pore-network model, while the microscale pore structure and hydrophilic/hydrophobic surface properties of GDL and MPL were fully considered.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.28 no.9
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• pp.367-372
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• 2016

Gas diffusion layer (GDL) of PEMFCs plays a role that it diffuses the reactant gases to the catalyst layer on the membrane and discharge water from the catalyst layer to the channel. Physical parameters related to the mass transport of GDL are mostly from the uncompressed GDLs while actual GDLs in the assembled stacks are compressed. In this study, the relation of compression and strain of GDLs with various Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) loading is measured experimentally and In-plane gas permeability is measured at the condition that the GDLs are in compressive strain. The gas permeability decreased with the loading of PTFE and the presentation of gas permeability under compressive stain is expected to improve the accuracy of modeling work of mass transport in the GDL.

• Journal of the Korean Electrochemical Society
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.270-278
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• 2007

PEMFC electrodes with various gas diffusion layers (GDL) were characterized to find out the effect of GDL on fuel cell performance. The physical properties of GDL such as electric conductivity, porosity, air permeability, water flux, PTFE content, etc had close relationship each other and affected on the variation of the cell performance. It was observed that the micro-porous layer (MPL) on carbon paper or cloth changed the physical properties of GDL and changed the cell performance. The variation of cell performance as a function of the physical properties of GDL showed different behaviors according to the amount of current density.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Heat Treatment
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.65-73
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• 2012

The Gas Diffusion Layer (GDL) of fuel cell, are required to provide both delivery of reactant gases to the catalyst layer and removal of water in either vapor or liquid form in typical PEMFCs. In this study, the fabrication of GDL containing Micro Porous Layer (MPL) made of the slurry of PVDF mixed with carbon black is investigated in detail. Physical properties of GDL containing MPL, such as electrical resistance, gas permeability and microstructure were examined, and the performance of the cell using developed GDL with MPL was evaluated. The results show that MPL with PVDF binder demonstrated uniformly distributed microstructure without large cracks and pores, which resulted in better electrical conductivity. The fuel cell performance test demonstrates that the developed GDL with MPL has a great potential due to enhanced mass transport property due to its porous structure and small pore size.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.207-210
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• 2005

In this paper, a two-dimensional cross-channel model was applied to investigate influence of the gas diffusion layer(GDL) property and flow field geometry in the anode side for proton exchange membrane fuel cell(PEMFC). The GDL is made of a porous material such as carbon cloth, carbon paper, or metal wire mesh. To the simplicity, the GDL is represented as a block of material containing numerous pathways through which gaseous reactants and liquid water can pass. The purpose of present work was to study the effect of the GDL thickness and the porosity, and flow field geometry by computational fluid dynamics(CFD)

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.1975-1979
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• 2011

The modification of a gas diffusion layer (GDL), a vital component in polymer electrolyte fuel cells, is described here for use in the electrochemical detection of antibody-antigen biosensors. Compared to other substrates (gold foil and graphite), mouse anti-rHBsAg monoclonal antibody immobilized on gold-coated GDL (G-GDL) detected analytes of goat anti-mouse IgG antibody-ALP using a relatively low potential (-0.0021 V vs. Ag/AgCl 3 M NaCl), indicating that undesired by-reactions during electrochemical sensing should be avoided with G-GDL. The dependency of the signal against the concentration of analytes was observed, demonstrating the possibility of quantitative electrochemical biosensors based on G-GDL substrates. When a sandwich method was employed, target antigens of rHBsAg with a concentration as low as 500 ng/mL were clearly measured. The detection limit of rHBsAg was significantly improved to 10 ng/mL when higher concentrations of the 4-aminophenylphosphate monosodium salt (APP) acting on substrates were used for generating a redox-active product. Additionally, it was shown that a BSA blocking layer was essential in improving the detection limit in the G-GDL biosensor.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.374-380
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• 2015

In this paper, a dynamic model describing the 2 phase effect on the gas diffusion layer depending on load change of a fuel cell stack was developed to examine the effects of liquid water in fuel cell cathode gas diffusion layer on the fuel cell performance. For the developed model, 2 phase effect on the performance of a fuel cell stack depending on the load changes, concentration distribution of water vapor and oxygen inside a gas diffusion layer, the effect of the thickness and porosity of the gas diffusion layer on the fuel cell stack voltage were examined. As a result, a fuel cell stack voltage for the 2 phase model within the scope of the research become lower than that for the 1 phase model regardless of the load. Although oxygen molar concentration for the gas diffusion layer adjacent to the catalyst layer was the lowest, water vapor concentration is the highest. In addition, as thickness and porosity of the gas diffusion layer increased and decreased, respectively, the fuel cell stack voltage decreased.