Journal
ENERGIES
Volume 15, Issue 17, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/en15176262
Keywords
air-cooled fuel cell; gas diffusion layer; transport processes; water and thermal management; current density uniformity
Categories
Funding
- National key research and development program [2021YFB4001701]
- Shaanxi Province Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars [2019JC-01]
- Shanghai Shenli Technology Co., Ltd.
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This study explores the effects of different designs of GDL on the performance of air-cooled fuel cells and finds that properly reducing the PTFE content can improve the cell performance. The sandwich-doped design performs worse compared to the uniformly doped design and causes uneven distribution of current density. The gradient-doped design, which increases the PTFE content gradually, can improve the current density while maintaining uniformity.
The design of a gas diffusion layer (GDL) is an effective way to manage water transport, thus improving the performance of air-cooled fuel cells. In the present study, three group designs of GDL with polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)-uniformly doped, in-planed sandwich doped and through-plane gradient doped-are proposed, and their effects on the performance of air-cooled fuel cells are explored by numerical simulation. The distribution of key physical quantities in the cathode catalyst layer (CCL), current density and the uniformity of current density distribution in the CCL were analyzed in detail. The results show that properly reducing the amount of PTFE in GDL is beneficial to promoting the water retaining capacity of air-cooled fuel cells, and then improving the performance of fuel cells. The performance of the in-plane sandwich GDL design cannot exceed the design with 10% PTFE uniformly doped, and this design will aggravate the uneven distribution of current density in CCL. Compared with the design of GDL with 40% PTFE uniformly doped, the current density can be improved by 22% when operating at 0.6 V by gradient increasing the PTFE content in GDL from the GDL/MPL interface to the gas channel. Furthermore, this design can maintain as good a current density uniformity as uniformly doping schemes.
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