Abstract
The proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is regarded as the most promising alternative power sources for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) due to its high energy density and silent operation. Since there are many load changes during UAV flight, thermal management is one of the important factor for the performance of PEMFC. In order to reduce the UAV weight for the stable operation of UAV, thermal management system (TMS) studied in this work does not use the fan but use the air flowing into UAV by UAV flight. In order to develop the passive type heat exchanger (HEX) for 1kW PEMFC, four types of HEXs are fabricated and their cooling performances are compared. The parametric study on the cooling performance of HEXs has performed with the variation of operating parameters such as mass flow rates and inlet temperature of air and coolant. Type 4 has the best performance in every case. This study can be helpful to achieve the optimal design of HEX for PEMFC powered UAV.