Abstract
Metallic flow field plates, also called bipolar plates, are an important component of fuel cell stacks, electrolyzers, hydrogen purification and compression stacks. The manufacturing of these plates by means of stamping or hydroforming is highly suitable for mass production. In this work, a toolbox is created that is suitable for a screening process of different flow field design variants. For this purpose, the geometry and computational mesh are generated in an automated manner. Basic building blocks are combined using the open source software SALOME, and these allow for the construction of a large variant of serpentine-like flow field structures. These geometric variants are evaluated through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations with the open source software OpenFOAM. The overall procedure allows for the screening of more than 100 variants within one week using a standard desktop computer. The performance of the flow fields is evaluated on the basis of two parameters: the overall pressure difference across the plate and the relative difference of the hydrogen concentration at the outlet of the channels. The results of such a screening first provide information about optimum channel geometry and the best choice of the general flow field layout. Such results are important at the beginning of the design process, as the channel geometry has an influence on the selection of the metal for deep drawing or hydroforming processes.
Highlights
The supply chain for a hydrogen-based economy requires several compression steps
The task of energy-efficient hydrogen purification and compression is the goal of the MEMPHYS project [3,4]
To meet a competitive cost target, the stack is assembled from stamped metallic flow field plates, as recently discussed with respect to fuel cell applications [12,13,14,15]
Summary
The supply chain for a hydrogen-based economy requires several compression steps. Electrolyzers usually only operate at up to 50 bar, compared to 200 bar for conventional storage tanks and 350–700 bar in hydrogen fuel cell cars [1,2]. To meet a competitive cost target, the stack is assembled from stamped metallic flow field plates, as recently discussed with respect to fuel cell applications [12,13,14,15]. These plates are manufactured by hydroforming, which is highly suitable for cost-effective mass production. The evaluation of the overall performance depends on specific model parameters that must be obtained from well-characterized experiments This is especially true for optimization tasks for fuel cell plates, e.g., as reported by Imbrioscia and Fasoli [26], Hu et al [27] and Iranzo et al [28]
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