Investigation of a waveform cathode channel on the performance of a PEM fuel cell by means of a pore-scale multi-component lattice Boltzmann method

A pore-scale model based on the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is established to investigate flow and mass transfer in the single cathode channel of a PEM fuel cell with heterogeneous porous gas diffusion layer (GDL). A two-dimensional single phase-multicomponent active model is used to simulate reaction flow in the PEM fuel cell. The main purpose of this paper is investigating the effect of wavy wall in the cathode channel on the performance of fuel cell. The validation demonstrates that the proposed scheme is a capable tool for modeling fluid flows in the heterogeneous porous media. After model validation, a parametric study is done on the wavelength at the two different operating pressures and its effects on the power density and pressure drop. The results demonstrate that the wavy channel improved the performance of fuel cell around 3.4% when P = 3 atm and near 2.8% in the operating pressure P = 1 atm whereas pressure drop rises more than three times in these channels. Also that is found that smaller wavelength does not have significant improvement on the power density in comparison with longer one. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Taiwan Institute of Chemical Engineers.