Macro-Scale Analysis of Large Scale PEM Fuel Cell Flow-Fields for Automotive Applications

The objective of this work is to establish the design principles for a proton exchange membrane fuel cell in automotive applications. In this work, the macro-scale analysis was considered to create the overall design principle. A combination of experiments and numerical simulations were carried out and the results analyzed to enhance understanding of the behavior of the large-scale 300-cm(2) proton exchange membrane fuel cell under automotive operations. A three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics-based methodology was used to predict such as the current and temperature distributions of this design as a function of anode relative humidity. The effect of flow direction and the cooling pattern on this design was also taken into account to enhance the understanding for this selected flow-field design. The predictions show that the gas flow and cooling directions are important dependent variables that can impact the overall performance and local distributions. (C) The Author(s) 2017. Published by ECS. All rights reserved.