Elsevier

Renewable Energy

Volume 147, Part 1, March 2020, Pages 650-662
Renewable Energy

Study of internal multi-parameter distributions of proton exchange membrane fuel cell with segmented cell device and coupled three-dimensional model

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2019.09.026Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A novel segmented PEMFC is designed for in situ study of multi-parameters.

  • Local current, RH and temperature distributions are measured simultaneously.

  • A 3D non-isothermal PEMFC model coupling two-phase flow is developed.

  • Air but H2 flow rate is critical to current, heat and water distributions.

  • A piece-wise function is proposed for quick prediction of local water content.

Abstract

Understanding multi-parameter distributions inside the proton exchange membrane fuel cell is critical for the stack design and operation optimization. In this work, in situ measurement and three-dimensional model of internal parameter distributions for fuel cell are studied both experimentally and numerically. A segmented cell device based on printed circuit board with embedded sensors is designed to detect local current, relative humidity and temperature in the single cell simultaneously. Meanwhile, a two-phase flow multi-physical fuel cell model validated by the in situ measurement is built to analyze various internal performances. Quantitative impact of convective gas flow on internal parameter distribution is analyzed to reveal the mechanism of water and heat balance for counter-flow operation. The results show that air flow rate is critical to the parameters distributions including current, relative humidity, reactants concentrations and temperature, but hydrogen flow rate effect is neglected. With parametric sweep modeling, the anode and cathode relative humidity distribution profiles could be respectively described by a linear-approximate piece-wise function, which is helpful to quickly predict and evaluate the internal water content distributions for various fuel cell designs and operations.

Introduction

Proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is becoming the most promising zero-emission power source for various applications [[1], [2], [3]]. Much progress has been made for fundamental study, technological research and product commercialization of PEMFC during last decades [[1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15]]. Among these research activities, investigation of internal parameter distributions of the fuel cell stack is the key to understand and improve the PEMFC performance as well as the stack design. There are two major methodologies for the internal fuel cell parameters studies: (1) in situ experimental measurement of current, relative humidity (RH) and temperature with segmented fuel cell device; (2) coupled fuel cell modeling concerning electrochemical reactions, two-phase fluid flow, mass and heat transfer and etc.

Many researchers have studied various experimental approaches to learn local current, temperature, humidity and etc. G. Maranzana et al. studied experimental characterization of internal currents during the start-up and shut-down of PEMFC using a segmented cell with straight flow channels [[16], [17], [18], [19]]. T. V. Reshetenko et al. measured the current distributions with a 5 × 2 segmented fuel cell setup to learn flow field, catalyst poisoning and reactants mass transfer effects on performance [[20], [21], [22], [23], [24]]. D. Liang et al. studied internal current distributions under fuel and oxidant starvations with a large active area segmented cell [[25], [26], [27]]. M. Belhadj et al. measured distributions of current density in a 100 cm2 single polymer fuel cell with a 12 by 12 data array to learn the uniformity of the reaction [28]. V. Lilavivat et al. developed measurement system for current distribution mapping and compared the results with numerical predictions [29]. S. Kim et al. designed a segmented cell device with 112 (7 × 16) segments to study current distribution of an active area of 360 cm2 [30]. H.Y. Wang et al. analyzed in-plane temperature distribution via a micro-temperature sensor in a unit PEMFC [31]. Y. Yu et al. studied PEMFC current mapping with a segmented current collector during the gas starvation and shutdown processes [32]. O.E. Herrera et al. studied anode and cathode overpotentials and temperature profiles in a PEMFC with a segmented hardware via reference electrodes [33]. D. Gerteisen et al. used a spatially resolved cell consisting of 49 segments to measure the local current density distribution and investigated effect of operating conditions on current density distribution and high frequency resistance [34]. J. P. Owejan et al. studied in situ water distributions of a PEMFC with application of the neutron radiography method for imaging of liquid water accumulation [35].

In addition to the experimental work mentioned above, a number of PEMFC modeling studies were also carried out to learn internal parameters distributions during last decades [[10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15]]. A.A. Shah et al. proposed a one-dimensional (1D) transient non-isothermal model of PEMFC [36]. L. Xing et al. [37,38], S. Chaudhary et al. [39], N. Akhtar et al. [40] and K.H. Wong et al. [41] studied two-dimensional (2D) PEMFC model and analyzed the two-phase flow effects on the fuel cell performance. H. Ju et al. developed a three-dimensional (3D) single-phase, non-isothermal model for PEMFC [42]. H. Meng et al. proposed a 3D model for two-phase flow and flooding dynamics in PEMFC considering two-phase transport process in the gas diffusion layer (GDL) and liquid coverage at the GDL-channel interface [43]. A. Raj et al. investigated the effect of multidimensionality in PEMFC with two similar steady state 2D and 3D models [44]. Y. Yin et al. proposed a numerical investigation on the characteristics of mass transport and performance of PEMFC with baffle plates installed in the flow channel [45]. S. Toghyani et al. studied thermal and electrochemical performance analysis of a PEMFC under assembly pressure on GDL considering intrusion of GDL into the gas flow channel [46]. J. Kim et al. simulated liquid water re-distributions in bi-porous layer flow-fields of PEMFC which removes excessive liquid water from the main flow-field [47,48]. A. Amirfazli et al. investigated the effect of manifold geometry on uniformity of temperature distribution in a PEMFC stack [49]. M. Abdollahzadeh et al. investigated three-dimensional modeling of PEMFC with contaminated anode fuel [50]. T. Bednarek et al. studied possible limitations and difficulties associated with computational fluid dynamics in PEMFC modeling [51].

In this paper, the internal parameter distributions under counter-flow operation of hydrogen and air are investigated by both experiment and modeling. Validated by the segmented cell measurements, a stationary two-phase flow multi-physical model is developed to analyze the internal water and reaction distributions. With the in situ measurements and numerical analysis, quantitative impact of convective gas flow on internal parameter distribution is analyzed to understand the fuel cell performance under counter-flow operation. In addition, internal water distribution profiles are investigated with parametric study by a novel linear-approximate piece-wise function for quick prediction and evaluation of local water content.

Section snippets

Experimental

The segmented fuel cell device in this work uses the multi-layered printed circuit board (PCB) design to integrate embedded sensors of current, RH and temperature, as shown in Fig. 1. The anode and cathode PCB plates are designed with straight parallel flow channels which are divided into ten segmentations with active area dimension of 20 mm by 20 mm. The current of each segment is collected by gold coated ribs in the flow field and conducted by the thru vias connectors in the PCB plate to the

Model geometry

A multi-physical 3D model with single straight flow channel is built, which couples sub-models of fluid dynamics, two-phase flow of water, electro-chemical reactions, mass transfer in each domain and thermal dynamics. The model geometric structure includes anode flow channel, anode gas diffusion layer (GDL), anode catalyst layer (CL), membrane, cathode CL, cathode GDL, cathode flow channel and coolant channels, as shown in Fig. 2. The air and coolant flow at the same direction, while the

Experimental studies and modeling analysis of local performance

Fig. 3 (a) and (b) show current distributions measurement in segmented cell under various reactants flow rates, while Fig. 3 (b) and (c) show the corresponding multi-physics modeling analysis results. Air flow rate is critical to the performance distributions, but hydrogen stoichiometry shows slight impact. With increased hydrogen flow rates, the overall local current profile moves to anode outlet a little bit. While with improved air stoichiometry, the current peak shifts apparently from near

Conclusion

The segmented cell device with multi-layered PCB flow field plates is used to investigate local current, RH and temperature in the counter-flow operation of fuel cell. For comparison, a two-phase flow three-dimensional fuel cell model is developed to analyze the internal performance with various operating parameters.

The results show that air flow rate is critical to the parameters distributions including current, RH, reactants concentrations and temperature, but hydrogen stoichiometry shows

Acknowledgement

This work is sponsored by National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2018YFB0105600), Science and Technology Program of Sichuan Province (No. 2019YFG0002 and No. 2017CC0017), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51707030) and Initiative Scientific Research Program of University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (No. ZYGX2018KYQD207 and No. ZYGX2018KYQD206).

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