Modeling and simulation for PEM fuel cell performance optimization

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Among various types of fuel cell systems, proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) has become promising owing to its high efficiency, simplicity in design, and low-temperature operating condition. Since PEMFC design iterations relying on experiments are usually very expensive and time-consuming, computer modeling has become an attractive research direction, revealing effective heat and water management strategies are of top importance in achieving the required performance and lifetime of PEMFC operation. Our initial efforts have been made to build up a comprehensive 3D PEMFC model with the heat and water management issue taken into account. As an extension of our ongoing PEMFC research work, the project proposed here will be aimed at incorporating all important physical and electrochemical processes arising during the PEMFC operation into a complete PEMFC model to more realistically account for multi-dimensional, multi-species, and multi-phase transport under non-isothermal conditions. For this purpose, our particular attention will be paid to three new ingredients: (a) water phase change; (b) second order electrochemical kinetics; and (c) transient behavior. The resulting model is expected to be of highly nonlinear and system-level dynamic natures, the successful numerical solution of which will strongly rely on advanced numerical techniques. Therefore, in addition to the steam of PEMFC model development, another stream will be unfolding towards 3D finite element mesh adaptation guided by the a posteriori error estimation in response to the complex flow pattern and sophisticated transport phenomena. This will represent the first application of adaptive finite element methods to the PEMFC computer simulation, and help achieve an accurate numerical solution on meshes of well controlled quality using a significantly reduced amount of computational resources. The two streams of research efforts will be eventually merging and then implemented into a commercially available CFD code. The resulting software package is expected to serve for the PEMFC researchers to obtain useful information and gain valuable insight and guidance for design, performance optimization, and cost reduction of PEMFCs.