Performance Change of Hydrogen Fueled Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cell Internally Humidified at the Cathode by Gas Flow Pattern

Abstract

With high hydrogen utilization operation, a minor imbalance in the distributed flow of the stack causes a shortage of hydrogen gas. In order to achieve high hydrogen utilization operation, we investigated the flow pattern for cells internally humidified at the cathode side. We fabricated both counter flow and co flow type cells for humidification of the cells inside the cathode and carried out electricity generation tests on single cells and cell stacks. Also we measured the distribution of relative humidity at the anode electrode for counter flow and co flow humidification of the cell inside the cathode. From these test results we concluded that the counter flow method is superior as a humidification cell inside a cathode when using the stack division method.