Performance enhancement of a high temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cell by bottomed-baffles in bipolar-plate channels

Abstract

Since HT-PEMFCs (high temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cell) operate above 120 °C, it can vaporize the liquid water produced at cathode to simplify the water management system and has better tolerance of CO in the PBI (polybenzimidazole) membrane. This study utilized a three-dimensional numerical model to explore the cell performance of HT-PEMFCs (high temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cells) under the installation of various-numbers baffles on the bottom of the anode and cathode bipolar-plate channels by the SIMPLE-C algorithm. Furthermore, this study accounted for the pressure drop through the bipolar-plate channel to determine the net HT-PEMFC power. The numerical results display that the highest net HT-PEMFC power exists as the number of bottomed-baffle is five, and the net HT-PEMFC power for five bottomed-baffles is higher than that for without baffles by 8%. The present simulation is verified by the HT-PEMFC performance measured from the in-house experiment to show that the CFD results reasonably consist with the measured data of in-house experiments. In addition, the five bottomed-baffle channel has lower total impedance than smooth channel resulted from an electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) test.