• Journal of the Korean Electrochemical Society
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.273-283
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• 2008

GDL(Gas Diffusion Layer) is one of the main components of PEM fuel cell. It transports reactants from the channel to the catalyst and removes reaction products from the catalyst to the channels in the flow filed plate. It is known that higher permeability of GDL can make it possible to enhance the gas transport through GDL, leading to better performance. And MEA's temperature is determined by gas and heat transport. In this paper, three dimensional numerical simulation of PEM fuel cell of parallel channel and serpentine channel by the permeability of GDL is presented to analysis heat and mass transfer characteristics using a FLUENT modified to include the electrochemical behavior. Results show that in the case of parallel channel, performance variation with change of permeability of GDL was not so much. This is thought because mass transfer is carried out by diffusion mechanism in parallel channel. Also, in the case of serpentine channel, higher GDL permeability resulted in better performance of PEM fuel cell because of convection flow though GDL. And mass transfer process is changed from convection to diffusion when the permeability becomes low.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.8 no.2 s.23
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• pp.15-27
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• 2004

The purpose of this paper is to improve the performance of Polymer electrolyte fuel cell(PEMFC) by studying the channel dimension of bipolar plates using commercial CFD program 'Fluent'. Simulations are done ranging from 0.5 to 3.0mm for different size in order to find the channel size which shoves the highst hydrogen consumption. The results showed that the smaller channel width, land width, channel depth, the higher hydrogen consumption in anode. When channel width is increased, the pressure drop in channel is decreased because total channel length Is decreased, and when land width is increased, the net hydrogen consumption is decreased because hydrogen is diffused under the land width. It is also found that the influence of hydrogen consumption is larger at different channel width than it at different land width. The change of hydrogen consumption with different channel depth isn't as large as it with different channel width, but channel depth has to be small as can as it does because it has influence on the volume of bipolar plates. however the hydrogen utilization among the channel sizes more than 1.0mm which can be machined in reality is the most at channel width 1.0, land width 1.0, channel depth 0.5mm and considered as optimum channel size. The fuel cell combined with 2cm${\times}$2cm diagonal or serpentine type flow field and MEA(Membrane Electrode Assembly) is tested using 100W PEMFC test station to confirm that the channel size studied in simulation. The results showed that diagonal and serpentine flow field have similarly high OCV and current density of diagonal (low field is higher($2-40mA/m^2$) than that of serpentine flow field under 0.6 voltage, but the current density of serpentine type has higher performance($5-10mA/m^2$) than that of diagonal flow field under 0.7-0.8 voltage.

• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.31-36
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• 2015

The demand for multi-functionality, high density, high performance, and miniaturization of IC devices has caused the technology paradigm shift for electronic packaging. So, thermal management of new packaged chips becomes a bottleneck for the performance of next generation devices. Among various thermal solutions such as heat sink, heat spreader, TIM, thermoelectric cooler, etc. on-chip liquid cooling module was investigated in this study. Micro-channel was fabricated on Si wafer using a deep reactive ion etching, and 3 different micro-channel designs (straight MC, serpentine MC, zigzag MC) were formed to evalute the effectiveness of liquid cooling. At the heating temperature of $200^{\circ}C$ and coolant flow rate of 150ml/min, straight MC showed the high temperature differential of ${\sim}44^{\circ}C$ after liquid cooling. The shape of liquid flowing through micro-channel was observed by fluorescence microscope, and the temperarue differential of liquid cooling module was measuremd by IR microscope.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.135-142
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• 2009

In this investigation, we prepared a 1 and 3-parallel serpentine single PEMFC, which has an active area of $100\;cm^2$ and a flow channel cross section of $1{\times}1mm$. Distribution and transport of water in a non-operating PEMFC were observed by varying flow types and the flow rates (250, 400, and 850 cc/min). This investigation was performed at the neutron imaging facility at the CO1d Neutron RAdiography facility (CONRAD), HMI, Germany of which the collimation ratio and neutron fluence rate are 250, $1{\times}10^{6}n/s/cm^2$, respectively. The neutron image was continuously recorded by a scintillator and lens-CCD coupled detector system every 10 seconds. It has been observed that although the distilled water was supplied into the cathode channel only, the neutron image showed a water movement from the cathode to the anode channel. The water at the cathode channel was completely discharged as soon as the pressurized air was supplied. But the water at the anode channel was not easily removed by the pressurized air except for the 3-parallel serpentine type with 850cc/min of air flow rate. Moreover, the water at the MEA wasn't removed for any of the cases.

• Journal of computational fluids engineering
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.31-36
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• 2010

In the present study, computations for flow fields inside the CDI unit cells with electrodes and spacers have been made to evaluate their performance. Three types of unit cells that include a planar type, a serpentine channel type, and a spiral wound type were considered and their flow characteristics were compared. From the computational results, it is found that the serpentine channel type has a large flow resistance and can not guarantee the outflow flux for industrial applications. On the other hand, the planar type can sustain a large enough outflow flux but it's efficiency is low for the electrode-use because of the non-uniform velocity distribution inside the cell and dead zones in every corner. Finally, The spiral wound type has not only a large outflow flux as much as the planar type has, but also a high efficiency for the electrode-use because of uniform velocity distribution. From this comparison, we can expect that the spiral wound type of CDI unit cell would have a high performance deionization capability.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.54 no.6
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• pp.847-853
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• 2016

Here has been examined a 3-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling in order to investigate the performance analysis of proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells with serpentine flow fields. The present CFD model considers the isothermal transport phenomena in a fuel cell involving mass, momentum transport, electrode kinetics, and potential fields. Co-current flow patterns for a PEMFC are considered for various geometries in the single straight cell. Current density distribution from the calculated distribution of oxygen and hydrogen mass fractions has been determined, where the activation overpotential has been also calculated within anode and cathode. CFD results showed that profiles differ from those simulations subjected to each the calculated activation overpotential. It is interesting that the present serpentine flow field shows the specific distribution of current density with respect to the aspect ratio of depth to width and the ratio of reaction area for various serpentine geometries. Simulation results were considered reasonable with the other CFD results reported in literature and global comparisons of the PEMFC model.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.29 no.10 s.241
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• pp.1289-1297
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• 2005

The flow in a microchannel is usually characterized as a low Reynolds number (Re) so that good mixing is quite difficult to be achieved. In this regard, we developed a novel chaotic micromixer, named Serpentine Laminating Micromixer (SLM) in the present study, Part 1. In the SLM, the higher level of chaotic mixing can be achieved by combining two general chaotic mixing mechanisms: splitting/recombination and chaotic advection. The splitting and recombination (in other term, lamination) mechanism is obtained by the successive arrangement of 'F'-shape mixing units in two layers. The chaotic advection is induced by the overall three-dimensional serpentine path of the microchannel. Chaotic mixing performance of the SLM was fully characterized numerically. To compare the mixing performance, a T-type micromixer which has the same width, height and length of the SLM was also designed. The three-dimensional numerical mixing simulations show the superiority of the SLM over the T-type micromixer. From the cross-sectional simulation results of mixing patterns, the chaotic advection effect from the serpentine channel path design acts favorably to realize the ideal lamination of fluid flow as Re increases. Chaotic mixing mechanism, proposed in this study, could be easily integrated in Micro-Total-Analysis-System, Lab-on-a-Chip and so on.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.34 no.10
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• pp.885-891
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• 2010

Thermal management is important for enhancing the performance and durability of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) and is taken into account in the design of PEMFCs. In general, cooling pates with circulating liquid coolant (water) are inserted between several unit cells to exhaust the reaction heat from PEMFCs. In this study, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed to characterize the uniform cooling performance of parallel multipass serpentine flow fields (MPSFFs) that were used as coolant flow channels in PEMFCs. The cooling performances of conventional serpentine and parallel flow fields were also evaluated for the purpose of comparison. The CFD results showed that the use of parallel MPSFFs can help reduce the temperature nonuniformity, and thus, can favorably enhance the performance and durability of PEMFCs.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.159-165
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• 2004

Fuel cell makes electricity through chemical reaction. Bipolar-plate distribute hydrogen, oxidation using channel geometry condensation of water vapor inside channels of bipolar-plates lowers efficiency of fuel cell. Usually high pressured gas supply is used to solve the water condensation problem with serpentine type channel geometry. In this study, a new channel geometry shows feasible to minimize lowering efficiency due to water condensation through numerical and experimental analysis.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.492-498
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• 2009

Six sigma methode was applied for optimization of flow field design of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). The optimization between number of channel and channel/rib width was suggested in this paper with six sigma method. With the help of six sigma design of experiment (DOE) the number of experiments may be reduced dramatically. The fuel cell channel design optimization with results of these experiments with a 100 $cm^2$ serpentine flow field indicates a optimization data for a given constant operating conditions.