Numerical analysis of the shape effect on PEMFC's Performace

연료전지 성능에 영향을 미치는 채널형상에 대한 연구

Formability is requested to successfully develop of a metal bipolar plate for mass production. From this point of view, wider channel and land width is more helpful to improve formability. But the performance of the fuel cell can be affected by its channel and land shape. So it is very important to select proper channel and land shape not to deteriorate the fuel cell performance. In this work, 3-dimensional, non-isothermal numerical simulation was performed to analyse the effects of channel and land width on the fuel cell performance. 3 types of straight channel were selected for the numerical simulation. The simulation results reveal that wide channel and land width lower fuel cell performance and decrease voltage at a high current density region. Water activity, temperature, oxygen concentration distributions were investigated to find the reasons of performance degradation. The results show that wide channel and land width give an bad effect on fuel cell performance because of low cool ins efficiency and lack of oxygen gas under the land.