Liquid cooling techniques in proton exchange membrane fuel cell stacks: A detailed survey

Abstract

Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) is a promising energy source in the future of the transportation sector for powering automobiles instead of Internal Combustion Engines (ICEs). This undoubtedly related to its friendly environmental characteristics and its higher efficiency than the IC Engines. However, there are still challenges that prevent its implementation on a wide scale in which one of these challenges is the thermal management problem of the PEMFCs cooling systems. This article introduces a detailed and comprehensive literature survey of the liquid cooling techniques in the PEMFC stacks, including operation principles and heat generation and removal characteristics. Liquid cooling has been generally and efficiently utilized in the high power PEMFC stacks (>10 kW), enabling the PEMFC to be applied in the transportation sector. In this regard, the previous literature related to the liquid-cooling optimization in PEMFC stacks, including various types of coolant flow field configurations and coolant channels geometries of PEMFC, is summarized. Considering the PEMFCs cooling systems criterion (such as uniform temperature, pressure drop, maximum temperature, heat transfer efficiency, and fuel cell (FC) performance, etc.). The efforts to maintain the low conductivity coolants and using the nanofluids based cooling system as recent alternative coolants in PEMFCs were also included. Further, the cooling loop of the automotive PEMFCs were comparatively reported.