Entrance Effects on the Flow Distribution in Manifold of Commercial-Size Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell Stacks

Abstract

The air flow distribution in manifold is critical to the performance of commercial-size proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) stack. Most of the existing works focus on the optimization of cell part of PEMFC stack ignoring the entrance effects, which cannot reflect the real situation of the working PEMFC stack. In this study, CFD model is employed to study the entrance effects on the flow distribution in manifold of PEMFC stack. A novel experiment setup is developed, which based on a 200-cell PEMFC stack with thin stamped bipolar plates and an active area of 256 cm2. The air flow distribution in manifold with different inlet pipe diameters are measured by experiments to validate the CFD model. Different of inlet pipe diameters and end plate inlet configurations are considered in the CFD model. The flowfield and flow rate distribution in manifold are obtained to evaluate the entrance effects on the flow distribution in manifold. The numerical results show that both of the inlet pipe diameter and end plate inlet configuration have great effects on the flow distribution in the manifold of commercial-size PEMFC stack, and a judicial matching of their configuration can provide the ideal uniform flow distribution. In addition, we determined the inlet pipe diameter and end plate inlet configuration of a 35 kW-class PEMFC stack that comprises 200 cells. The experimental results and numerical analysis are beneficial to optimization of commercial-size PEMFC stack design. Figure 1