• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
• /
• v.30 no.12 s.255
• /
• pp.1228-1235
• /
• 2006

PEMFC(Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell) is a low temperature fuel cell and has many probabilities of commercial use. However, water management is one of the serious technical problems for commercialization. It is necessary to understand the relationship between operation conditions and water behavior in PEMFC channel because it affects fuel cell performance. In this paper, the distribution of current density according to inlet humidity condition is mainly observed and discussed. If the anode inlet is well humidified, electro-osmotic drag is very active. For this reason, current density is very high at inlet side and the distribution is non-uniform.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 2006.11a
• /
• pp.101-104
• /
• 2006

Water management is considered to be one of the main issues to be addressed for the performance improvement of proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell. For good water management, the detailed information on the water distribution inside an operating PEM fuel cell should be available to main an adequate level of hydration in the PEM While avoiding performance decline due to liquid rater flooding. For the PEM fuel cell to be commercially viable as vehicle applications, the flooding on the cathode side should be minimized during the fuel ceil operation. In this study to investigate cathode flooding and its relation with temperature distribution in flow channels, visualization study was performed on the cathode side of a PEM fuel cell. For the direct visualization of temperature field and water transport in cathode flow channels, a transparent cell was designed and manufactured using quartz window. Water transport and its two-phase flow characteristics in flow channels were investigated experimentally. Also, the visualization of temperature distribution In cathode flow channels was made by using IR camera. Results indicated that the temperature rise near the exit of cathode flow channel was found. It is found that this area corresponds to the flooding area from both temperature and flooding visualization results It is expected that this study can effectively contribute to get the detailed data on water transport linked with heat management during the operation of a PEM fuel cell

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.30 no.2
• /
• pp.231-238
• /
• 2006

The performance of free-breathing polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) was studied experimentally and the effect of cathode separator structure on the cell performance was investigated. Cathode separators were used for the cell with $18cm^2$ active area. In channel type, the contact resistance is low, and the nature convection. which is strongly affected by the cross-sectional shape of cathode separator channel, is dominant in a cell performance. The maximum power density with $18cm^2$ active area is $105mW/cm^2$ using the 10mm depth and 2mm width channel. A computational analysis was optimum structure of free-breathing channel type PEMFC for robotic application.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers Conference
• /
• 2007.04a
• /
• pp.233-237
• /
• 2007

Recent experimental data shows that an irregular fuel surface pops up during the combustion test. This may contribute to the agitated boundary layer due to blowing effect of fuel vaporization. Blowing effect can be of significance in determining the combustion characteristics of solid fuel within the oxidizer flow. LES was implemented to investigate the flow behavior on the fuel surface and turbulence evolution due to blowing effect. Simple channel geometry was used for the investigation instead of circular grain configuration without chemical reactions. This may elucidate the main mechanism responsible for the formation of irregular isolated spots during the combustion in terms of turbulence generation. The interaction of turbulent flow with blowing mass flus causes to breakup turbulent coherent structures and to form the small scale isolated eddies near the fuel surface. This mechanism attributes to the formation of irregular isolated sopt on the fuel surface.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
• /
• v.32 no.5
• /
• pp.331-339
• /
• 2021

This study presents a novel way to enhance uniformity of the gas flow inside the solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), which is critically important to fuel cell performance, by using dimples. A pattern of dimple, which works as a flow distributor/collector, is designed at the inlet and outlet section of a straight channel gas separator. Size of the dimples and the gap between them were changed to optimize the flow uniformity, and any change in size or gap is considered as one design. The results show that some dimple patterns significantly enhance the uniformity compared to baseline, about 4%, while the others slightly reduce it, about 1%. Besides, the dimple pattern also affects to the pressure drop in the flow channel, however the pressure drop in all cases are negligible (less than 26.4 Pa).

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
• /
• v.8 no.2 s.23
• /
• pp.15-27
• /
• 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 Korean Society of Industry Convergence
• /
• v.24 no.6_1
• /
• pp.683-691
• /
• 2021

Bipolar plates with channel width of 0.5 mm, 0.4 mm, and 0.3 mm respectively were printed using a 3D printer. The shape of three b ipolar plates was rectangular, the channel depth was 0.5 mm, and the thickness of base was 0.5 mm. The bipolar plate with channel width of 0.5 mm had 45 channels, and their active area was 44.5 mm × 50 mm. The bipolar plate with channel width of 0.4 mm had 57 channels and its active area was 45.2 mm × 50 mm, and the bipolar plate with channel width of 0.3 mm had 75 channels and its active area was 44.7 mm × 50 mm. The bipolar plates were printed using PLA filament. The cross-sectional lengths of the bipolar plates with channel widths of 0.5 mm and 0.4 mm were identical by 96% of the designed cross-sectional length. Whereas the bipolar plate with a channel length of 0.3 mm had a large difference of 25% from the designed cross-sectional length.

• Journal of Electrochemical Science and Technology
• /
• v.13 no.1
• /
• pp.63-70
• /
• 2022

Compared with hydrogen, ammonia has the advantages of high gravimetric hydrogen densities (17.8 wt.%), ease of storage and transportation as a chemical hydrogen storage medium, while its application in small-scale on-site hydrogen production scenarios is limited by the need for complex separation equipment during high purity hydrogen production. Therefore, the study of PEMFC, which can directly utilize ammonia decomposition gas, can greatly expand the application of fuel cells. In this paper, the output characteristics, fuel efficiency and the variation trend of hydrogen concentration and local current density in the anode channel of fuel cell with the output voltage of PEMFC fueled by ammonia decomposition gas were studied by experiment and simulation. The results indicate that the maximum output power of the hybrid fuel decreases by 9.6% compared with that of the pure hydrogen fuel at the same inlet hydrogen equivalent. When the molar concentration of hydrogen in the anode channel is less than 0.12, the output characteristics of PEMFC will be seriously affected. Employing ammonia decomposition gas as fuel, the efficiency corresponding to the maximum output power of PEMFC is approximately 47%, which is 10% lower than the maximum efficiency of pure hydrogen.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.49 no.1
• /
• pp.267-276
• /
• 2017

In any reactor physics analysis, the instantaneous power distribution in the core can be calculated when the actual bundle-wise burnup distribution is known. Considering the fact that CANDU (Canada Deuterium Uranium) utilizes on-power refueling to compensate for the reduction of reactivity due to fuel burnup, in the CANDU fuel management analysis, snapshots of power and burnup distributions can be obtained by simulating and tracking the reactor operation over an extended period using various tools such as the $^*SIMULATE$ module of the Reactor Fueling Simulation Program (RFSP) code. However, for some studies, such as an evaluation of a conceptual design of a next-generation CANDU reactor, the preferred approach to obtain a snapshot of the power distribution in the core is based on the patterned-channel-age model implemented in the $^*INSTANTAN$ module of the RFSP code. The objective of this approach is to obtain a representative snapshot of core conditions quickly. At present, such patterns could be generated by using a program called RANDIS, which is implemented within the $^*INSTANTAN$ module. In this work, we present an alternative approach to derive the patterned-channel-age model where a simulated-annealing-based algorithm is used to find such patterns, which produce reasonable power distributions.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
• /
• v.25 no.4
• /
• pp.386-392
• /
• 2014

The effective water management in a polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is one of the key strategies for improving cell performance and durability. In this work, an ex situ measurement was carried out to understand the water droplet behavior on the surface of gas diffusion layer (GDL) as a fundamental study for establishing novel water management. For that purpose, simplified cell including one rib and two flow channels was designed and fabricated. Using this ex situ device, the water droplet emergence through the GDL of the PEMFC was emulated to understand liquid water transport through the porous diffusion medium. Through the visualization experiment, the emergence and growth of water droplets at the channel/GDL interface are mainly observed with the surface characteristics of GDL (SGL 10BA, 24BA) and rib when the liquid water passes through the GDL and is expelled to the flow channel. It is expected that the results obtained from this study can contribute to the better understanding on the water droplet behavior (emergence and removal) in the flow channels of PEMFC.