Impact of cooling channel geometry on thermal management and performance of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell

Abstract

Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Malta, 16-18 July, 2012.Proton exchange membrane fuel cell has many distinctive features that made it an attractive alternative clean energy source, including low start-up, high power density, high efficiency, portability and remote applications. Commercial application of this energy source had been greatly hindered by series of technical issues ranging from inadequate water and heat management, intolerance to impurities such as CO, slow electrochemical kinetics at electrodes, and relatively high cost. An approach to stem the thermal build-up within the fuel cell structure that could lead to degradation of the system components is by integrating cooling channels as part of flow structure of the PEM fuel cell system. In this study, a numerical investigation was carried out to investigate the impact of cooling channel geometry in combination with temperature dependent operating parameters on thermal management and overall performance of a PEM fuel cell system. The evaluation is performed using a CFD code based on a finite volume approach. The systems net power and polarization curves are presented as a function of the system temperature, operating parameters and geometry. In addition, the parameters studied were optimized using a mathematical optimization code integrated with the commercial computational fluid dynamics code.