Study of Cathode-side Manifold Flow Channel in PEM Fuel Cell
The flow channel is the place inside the PEM fuel cell that is responsible for the transportation of reactants and the elimination of products,so the structure of the flow channel has an important influence on the performance of the PEM membrane fuel cell.Because the anode passes pure hydrogen,the hydrogen diffusion coefficient is large.The anode will not have a situation where the amount of hydrogen is not enough to meet the reaction needs,so the reaction situation at the anode is not studied in this paper.The cathode side is the main re-action site,and the cathode side flow channel needs to allow as much oxygen as possible to participate in the re-action while having better drainage capacity.Based on the current research status of the traditional flow channel,1 kind of split-flow cathode-side flow channel is designed.Numerical simulation and analytical comparison of the new run-ners were done by using the multi-physics field coupling software COMSOL.The results show that,compared with the conventional DC channel,the fuel cell with split-flow flow channel design on the cathode side can provide a larger mass fraction and more uniform oxygen distribution,a reduced mass fraction of water,and a more uniform current density dis-tribution than that of the cathode-side fuel cell with conventional DC channel design.
PEMFCFlow channelSplit flow channelCurrent density
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