Abstract
A modified 3D numerical model on the energy conversion process in the anode side of a Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) system was constructed and validated to published experimental results. Systematic simulations were performed to investigate the underlying mechanisms of the energy conversion process, and the combined effects of inlet flow rate and input methanol concentration were summarized systematically. The increase of flow rate was found to be an effective strategy to accelerate the internal flow fields, while the diffusion layer was proposed to be a critical component in the design of high-performance DMFC. The frontier for optimal conditions of DMFC’s output was also determined, which can be helpful to improve the energy conversion performance of DMFC in practical applications.
Highlights
The Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC), which takes advantage of methanol oxidation reaction to convert chemical energy into electricity, has attracted considerable attention in recent years as a prosperous power source for mobile applications [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
We focus on the combined effects of inlet flow rate and input methanol concentration on the energy conversion performance of a certain DMFC system in the present study
Considering the effect of oxygen availability, a modified 3D numerical model about the energy conversion process of DMFC was constructed by coupling the equations of species transport, mass and momentum conservations
Summary
The Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC), which takes advantage of methanol oxidation reaction to convert chemical energy into electricity, has attracted considerable attention in recent years as a prosperous power source for mobile applications [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. As the underlying mechanism of such a multi-parameter dependent system is usually hard to be experimentally determined, the comprehensive modelings of DMFC systems are essential in optimization design and operational management. Several mechanical models based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques were proposed to study the energy conversion process of DMFC systems, from one-dimensional [11], two-dimensional [12,13] to three-dimensional (3D) [14,15,16,17,18,19] points of view. Ge and Liu have designed one of the earliest 3D multi-component models by coupling the continuity, momentum and species conservation equations for both the anode and cathode catalyst layers in DMFCs [14].
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