Version 1
: Received: 6 September 2023 / Approved: 7 September 2023 / Online: 11 September 2023 (07:12:52 CEST)
How to cite:
Heidary, H.; Steinberger-Wilckens, R.; Moein Jahromi, M.; El-kharouf, A. Experimental and Numerical Evaluation of Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells with Porous Foam Distributor. Preprints2023, 2023090630. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0630.v1
Heidary, H.; Steinberger-Wilckens, R.; Moein Jahromi, M.; El-kharouf, A. Experimental and Numerical Evaluation of Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells with Porous Foam Distributor. Preprints 2023, 2023090630. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0630.v1
Heidary, H.; Steinberger-Wilckens, R.; Moein Jahromi, M.; El-kharouf, A. Experimental and Numerical Evaluation of Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells with Porous Foam Distributor. Preprints2023, 2023090630. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0630.v1
APA Style
Heidary, H., Steinberger-Wilckens, R., Moein Jahromi, M., & El-kharouf, A. (2023). Experimental and Numerical Evaluation of Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells with Porous Foam Distributor. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0630.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Heidary, H., Mahbod Moein Jahromi and Ahmad El-kharouf. 2023 "Experimental and Numerical Evaluation of Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells with Porous Foam Distributor" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0630.v1
Abstract
This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of metal foam employment within polymer electrolyte fuel cells (PEFCs) and compares it with conventional serpentine channels from both experiment viewpoints and computational fluid dynamics simulation. The experiments are designed to study the effects of material, area density, compression ratio, and final thickness of metal foam. Additionally, the influence of housing plate material and relative humidity (RH) is also tested for the first time. The results reveal that at RH=75-100%, the best distributor design is nickel foam with a compression ratio of 70%, a final thickness of 0.5mm, and SS-304 housing plate, which delivers 3110 mA cm-2 as limiting current density that is scarce in the literature. The PEFC with this foam distributor shows a 10% improvement in maximum power density and 45% in limiting current density compared to the serpentine channel case. While at RH=30%, the same foam flow field with a final thickness of 1mm is a superior option. The experiments also indicate that maximum power density increases by 23% as the compression ratio rises from 0 to 70%, while reducing final thickness from 1 to 0.5 mm causes a 19% enhancement in cell performance. Simulation results reveal that metal foam is more successful in evenly reactant distribution so that the average oxygen mass fraction at the cathode catalyst layer is increased by 38% in the metal foam case compared to the serpentine channel.
Keywords
Metal foam distributor; Compression ratio; Limiting current density; Maximum power density; Serpentine channel; Uniform distribution
Subject
Engineering, Energy and Fuel Technology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
