Experimental investigation and numerical comparison of the performance of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell at different channel geometry

Abstract

In this study, the performance of a PEM fuel cell is investigated experimentally and numerically by changing the geometry of the channels. At first an experimental setup is used and three different fuel cells with rectangular, elliptical and triangular serpentine channels are constructed. The active area of each cell is 25 cm2 that its weight is 1,300 g. The material of the gas diffusion layer is carbon clothes, the membrane is nafion 117 and the catalyst layer is a plane with 0.004 g cm−2 platinum. Then a complete three-dimensional model for fuel cell is used to investigate the effect of using this channels geometry on the performance. The proposed model is a full cell model, which includes all the parts of the PEM fuel cell, flow channels, gas diffusion electrodes, catalyst layers and the membrane. Coupled transport and electrochemical kinetics equations are solved in a single domain; therefore no interfacial boundary condition is required at the internal boundaries between cell components. The results show that the predicted polarization curves by using this model are in good agreement with the experimental results. Also the results show that when the geometry of channel is rectangular the performance of the cell is better than the triangular and elliptical channel.