Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 1-4 July, 2007.
Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFC) are
emerging on the market as a promising technology for
powering cars and combined heat and power applications in
buildings. The thermodynamic performance of these cells is
limited at the moment by membrane technology and power
use of the peripheral equipment. The interaction of the fuel
cell with it’s peripheral equipment is often not optimized at the
moment. Therefore, in this paper a thermodynamic model for
Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) Fuel Cells is developed
under ASPEN PLUS. This model has to be sufficiently
accurate while consuming little computational time. This
condition is necessary to integrate the fuel cell model with its
peripheral equipment.
The model is based on a 3 control volume approach
including the complete reaction modelling. The PEM model
not only calculates the cell voltage, it also includes a detailed
heat transfer model that predicts outlet temperatures and
cooling rates. The PEM model can predict the steady-state
performance of a stand-alone fuel cell stack. The model is
validated by comparing simulated working characteristics with
experimental data out of the open literature and with the
measured performance of the bench-scale PEM fuel cells at
the VITO.
Finally the performance and temperature distribution is
calculated and compared to know measurement data and other
modelling results. The model predictions for temperature are
slightly differing from the measurements, but the new model is
more accurate then previously formulated models.
