Chapter 5 - Cell-level modeling of proton exchange membrane fuel cell

Abstract

In this chapter, we will focus on the modeling skills of a single proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell consisting of all of the main components (e.g., bipolar plate, gas diffusion layer, microporous layer, catalyst layer, and membrane, including the three-dimensional (3D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model and dimension-reduced models. In these models, the gas–liquid phase interface and the complex porous structure in the porous electrodes are neglected, limited mainly by the calculation efficiency; they are also the two main consumptions in cell-level models of the PEM fuel cell. The 3D CFD model takes advantage of high accuracy owing to the solution of complete governing equations with a detailed geometry structure as the computational domain. In comparison, the dimension-reduced model features high calculation efficiency, which has an important role in the large-scale applications of cell design and development.