A review on the approaches applied for cooling fuel cells

Fuel cells are employed for wide variety of applications due to their several advantages such as low carbon dioxide emission, no requirement for moving components and high efficiency. In order to have efficient performance and prevent damaging the fuel cells' components, appropriate cooling is required. Various methods are applied for cooling such as passive methods, air cooling, liquid cooling and phase change cooling. In the present article, a comprehensive review is carried out on the cooling approaches mentioned above and their advantages and disadvantages. In addition, the methods used for enhancing the cooling are represented. The results show that the configuration of cooling system noticeably influence their performance. Moreover, using some ideas such as applying nanofluids, as the fluids with enhanced thermal properties, can be useful for heat transfer enhancement. Improving the efficiency of the cooling approaches has some advantages such as reducing the size and weight of the system, enhancement of fuel cell performance and more uniform temperature distribution of stack. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.