• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2008.11b
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• pp.2828-2833
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• 2008

Water management is one of many operating parameters, which influences the performance and stability of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). Local humidity condition including liquid water saturation has profound impacts on the distributions of overpotentials, current density, and membrane water content. Computational fluid dynamics simulations were conducted to investigate the effect of the inlet humidity variation on the performance of a PEMFC of $9\;cm^2$ active cell area with serpentine flow fields. The results showed that the performance of the simulated PEMFC remained at an almost same level when the cathode inlet humidity was changed from 100% to 60%, while reaching its maximum at air humidity of 80%. However, further decrease in the cathode inlet humidity below 40% started to significantly deteriorate the performance of the PEMFC. The variations of overpotentials, membrane water content, etc. due to the change in the cathode inlet humidity were also discussed.

• Applied Chemistry for Engineering
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.618-623
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• 2022

The bipolar plate is a key component of the polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) that transfers reactants and electrons, discharges water and heat as by-products, and serves as a mechanical support for the membrane electrode assembly (MEA). Therefore, the flow field structure of the bipolar plate plays an important role in improving fuel cell performance. In this study, PEMFC performance was investigated with copper foams with different compressibility ratios applied to cathode bipolar plates using a 25 cm² unit cell. The total resistance decreased as the compressibility ratio of the metal foams increased, and, in particular, the charge transfer and mass transfer resistance were significantly improved compared to the serpentine flow field, lowering voltage loss in medium and high current density region. In the case of pressurized air reactant flow with serpentine structure, fuel cell performance was similar to that of a compressed metal foam flow field (S3) up to the medium current density region, but low performance appeared in the high current density region due to flow field structure limitations.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.1621-1632
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• 1993

A numerical simulation is carried out on flows in a rotating serpentine flow passage, which models a cooling passage in a gas turbine blade, by using a 3-D FVM based TURBO-D program. When it is rotating, the flow field exhibits quite different aspects due to the effect of the Coriolis force. Especially the secondary flow field appearing in the cross-sectional area is very complex because of the combined effect of the Coriolis force and the centrifugal force in the curved area. Local Nusselt numbers are also obtained based on the Reynolds analogy and compared with the published experimental data showing a good agreement. The results of the present study can be applied to the design of cooling passages of a gas turbine blade.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.86-93
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• 2007

The PEM (polymer electrolyte membrane) fuel cell is one of the promising fuel cell systems as a new small power generating device for automobiles and buildings. The optimal design of cooling plates installed between MEA (membrane electrode assembly) is very important to achieve high performance and reliability of the PEMFC because it is very sensitive to temperature variations. In this study, six types of cooling plate models for the PEMFC including basic serpentine and parallel shapes were designed and their cooling performances were analyzed by using three-dimensional fluid dynamics with commercial software. The model 3 designed by revising the basic serpentine model represented the best cooling performance among them in the aspect of uniformity of temperature distribution and thermal reliability, The serpentine models showed higher pressure drop than the parallel models due to a higher flow rate.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.449-454
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• 2006

Neutron imaging technique was used to investigate the water distribution and movement in Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) at HANARO, KAERI. The Feasibility tests were performed in the first and second exposure rooms at the neutron radiography facility (NRF) at HANARO in order to check the ability of each exposure room, respectively. The feasibility test apparatus was composed of water and pressurized air before making up the actual test apparatus. Due to the low neutron intensity in the second exposure room, the exposure time was too long to investigate the transient phenomena of PEMFC. Although the exposure time was improved to 0.1 sec in the first exposure room, it was difficult to discriminate detail water movement at the channel due to the high noise level. Therefore, the experimental setup must be optimized according to the test conditions. Water discharge characteristics were investigated under different flow field geometries by using feasibility test apparatus and the neutron imaging technique. The water discharge characteristics of a 3-parallel serpentine are superior to those of a 1-parallel serpentine, but water at Membrane Electrode Assembly (MEA) was not removed, regardless of the flow field type.

• 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.

• 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.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.291-300
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• 2004

Performance of PEMFC is affected by many factors such as that of MEA, configuration of flow field, operating conditions, humidification, cooling and so on. In this study, in order to improve the performance of fuel cell, a small area fuel cell stack was made and its performance was tested under various operating conditions. Stack consists of 3 single PEM fuel cells. Channel is serpentine type and the active area of the electrode is $50cm^2$. The test results show that the peak power is 60W at $70^\circ{C}$ of stack temperature with humidification condition.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.245-251
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• 2016

A numerical model is developed to predict distributions of current density and temperature. Also the complete fuel cell performances were compared. In this study the effect of flow field design and flow direction on current density and temperature distribution as well as full cell performance. The complete three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations were solved with convergence of electro-chemical reactions terms. In this paper, the two different flow field design were simulated, straight channel and rectangular serpentine flow channel, which is commonly used. The effect of flow direction, co-flow and counter-flow, was also analyzed. The current density and temperature is higher with abundant oxygen not fuel. Also, temperature distribution was able to be drawn by using computer simulation. In this paper, the relationship among flow pattern, flow field design and current denstity distribution.

• Journal of the Korean Electrochemical Society
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.61-67
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• 2009

Flow-field design has much influence over the performance of proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) because it affects the pressure magnitude and distribution of the reactant gases. To obtain the pressure magnitude and distribution of reactant gases in five kinds of flow-field designs, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis was performed. After the CFD analysis, a single cell test was carried out to obtain the performance values. As expected, the pressure differences due to different flow-field configurations were related to the PEMFC performance because the actual performance results showed the same tendency as the results of the CFD analysis. A large pressure drop resulted in high PEMFC performance. The single serpentine configuration gave the highest performance because of the high pressure difference magnitudes of the inlet/outlet. On the other hand, the parallel flow-field configuration gave the lowest performance because the pressure difference between inlet and outlet was the lowest.