The Role of Porous Carbon Inserts on the Performance of Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cells: A Parametric Numerical Study

Herein, for the first time, a computational fluid dynamic study is performed to investigate the effects of using porous carbon inserts (PCI) on the performance of PEMFC. A 3D multiphase multicomponent model is developed to simulate the fuel cell performance. The effects of several geometric and physical parameters of the PCI, including porosity, size, and the arrangement of PCI in the landing area, are numerically examined, which are not investigated in the literature so far. The numerical results showed that using PCI, a 23% improvement in the fuel cell performance is achieved for the optimum case with 80% PCI. In addition, increasing the PCI porosity results in performance enhancement (12.6% improvement when increasing the porosity up to 0.8). Using PCI with different rib/channel width ratios demonstrates that the use of PCI at higher ratios has a more significant effect. When using 34.1% PCI in a case with a ratio of 2:1, the performance increases about 35%. Moreover, a PCI with larger longitudinal size (4 mm compared to 2 mm) shows higher performance enhancement (5.3% compared to 3.5%).

Automated summary

In this study, a computational fluid dynamic method is used to investigate the effects of using porous carbon inserts on the performance of proton exchange membrane fuel cells. The results show that the use of porous carbon inserts can significantly improve the performance of fuel cells, with increased energy conversion efficiency and higher power output.