ABSTRACT
Fuel cell (FC) is an electrochemical device which converts the chemical energy of fuel directly into electrical energy with high efficiency and without any toxic by-products. Flow field plates are the backbone of the FC. It is an essential component of the FC with multifunctional character. Modeling the transport phenomena in an FC plays a vital role in the development of FCs. Numerical modeling saves the operational time and cost during testing and development of FC systems. In the present work, a complete three-dimensional steady-state, single-phase isothermal computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of a proton exchange membrane FC with a single serpentine flow channel is proposed to analyze the species transport phenomenon. The numerical model was developed using the commercial CFD code (ANSYS Fluent 15.0) and simulations were carried out with species concentration on anode side as H2-0.8, O2-0, and H2O-0.2 and on the cathode side H2-0, O2-0.2, and H2O-0.1 to get important parameters such as variation of hydrogen, oxygen, water mass fraction, and liquid water activity in the flow channels, membrane water content and membrane protonic conductivity. The numerical results show that at lower cell voltage (0.4 V) which corresponds to higher current density, the hydrogen and oxygen consumption and water 612production are high. Finally, the polarization curve obtained was compared with the available experimental data in the literature. It is found that the numerical results are in good agreement with the experimental results.
