A CFD Modeling Study Based on Relative Humidity Effect on PEMFC Performance

Abstract

Water management is a crucial parameter that significantly affects the uniform distributions of current density and cell voltage, durability, and working life of the fuel cell. In this investigation, three dimensional steady model was proposed for Z-type and U-type geometry and numerical simulations were fulfilled using commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) ANSYS FLUENT to investigate the impact of reactant humidification on cell performance and water manage-ment. CFD results were shown on polarization and power curves to observe the relative humidity (RH) effect on maximum power point tracking. The results demonstrated that cell performance could be improved significantly by decreas-ing RH of the cathode inlet gas from 100 to 10% at high current densities. In-creasing RH of the anode gas inlet from 10 to 100% at low operating voltages re-sulted in a superior performance. It was noted that convenient humidification of the reactant was essential.

Keywords

• CFD Model;
• PEMFC;
• ; Relative Humidity;
• Water Management

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