A novel flow channel design to achieve high temperature homogenization in solid oxide fuel cell

Abstract

The thermal stress, which has a significant impact on the stable and prolonged operation of Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFCs), can be further aggravated by the presence of local hot spots. Improving the distribution uniformity of physical quantities is of great significance to improving the internal temperature distribution of the SOFC. In this study, to improve the uniformity of temperature distribution, the thermal and flow distribution of three kinds of flow fields are investigated including Z, U, and L flow fields. The results show that the temperature distribution is dominated by the flow rate distribution. To optimize the physical quantity distribution of the designed flow channel, a novel, and easy-to-manufacture thermal management is proposed. This method is to adopt the extended ridge for controlling the flow rate into each flow channel. Moreover, a multi-population genetic algorithm is adopted to optimize the length of each extended ridge. The optimized results show that the temperature deviation in the Z, U, and L flow fields are reduced by about 64.20 %, 26.06 %, and 23.45 % respectively. This novel thermal management method enables more uniform temperature distribution and it is expected to be used in large-scale manufacturing due to its simple but subtle design.