A two-dimensional, transient, compressible isothermal and two-phase model for the air-side electrode of PEM fuel cells

Abstract

A two-dimensional, transient, compressible, isothermal and two-phase flow of reactant–product mixture in the air-side electrode of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) are numerically studied in the present paper. The mixture is composed of four species: oxygen, nitrogen, liquid water and water vapor. The governing PDE’s are conservation of the water vapor and oxygen species, momentum equation of the mixture ( gas + liquid ), mass conservation of the liquid phase, and mass conservation of the mixture. In this study, a separate PDE for the mass conservation of the liquid water is solved to calculate the saturation levels. The capillary pressure was used to determine the slip velocity between the phases. A full compressible form of the momentum equation was used, with the ∇ ⋅ V preserved in the equation. The Maxwell–Stefan equation was used to model the diffusive fluxes of the multi-component gas mixture. The strongly coupled equations are solved based on a recently developed finite volume SIMPLER scheme of S.V. Patankar, Numerical Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow, Hemisphere Publishing Corp., McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1984. The computational domain consists of two regions; an open area (gas delivery channel) linked to a porous gas diffusion layer (GDL). A single (unified) set of the PDE’s are used for the whole domain with the corresponding properties of each sub-domain. A polarization curve for the whole spectrum of the dry and wet regions were obtained. The results were compared with the experiments of E.A. Ticianelli, C.R. Derouin, A. Redondo, S. Srinivasan, J. Electrochem. Soc. 135 (1988) 2209, and good agreements were achieved.