Effects of relative gas flow direction in the anode and cathode on the performance characteristics of a Molten Carbonate Fuel Cell

Abstract

In this work, three-dimensional numerical simulation of conservation equations for mass, momentum, energy, species and electrochemical reaction has been carried out to compare the performance characteristics of a Molten Carbonate Fuel Cell (MCFC) with three different flow types, co-flow, counter-flow and cross-flow. Depending on the flow types, distributions of pressure difference, temperature and current density in the electrolyte matrix were examined and the fractions of various losses were scrutinized. The simulation results show that the co-flow type has the lowest pressure difference across the matrix and the distributions of temperature and current density are more uniform than other types. However, it was found that since irreversible losses due to ohmic resistance, anode activation and cathode activation are smallest in the counter-flow type, best performance can be expected by the MCFC with the counter-flow type.