Application of lattice Boltzmann method to a micro-scale flow simulation in the porous electrode of a PEM fuel cell

The electrode of a PEM fuel cell is a porous medium generally made of carbon cloth or paper. Such a porous electrode has been widely modeled as a homogeneous porous medium with a constant permeability in the literature of PEM fuel cell. In fact, most of gas diffusion media are not homogeneous having non-isotropic permeability. In case of carbon cloth, the porous structure consists of carbon fiber tows, the bundles of carbon fiber, and void spaces among tows. The combinational effect of the void space and tow permeability results in the effective permeability of the porous electrode. In this work, the lattice Boltzmann method is applied to the simulation of the flow in the electrode of a PEM fuel cell. The electrode is modeled as void space and porous region which has certain permeability and the Stokes and Brinkman equations are solved in the flow field using the lattice Boltzmann model. The effective permeability of the porous medium is calculated and compared to an analytical calculation showing a good agreement. It has been shown that the permeability of porous medium is strongly dependant on the fiber tow orientation in three-dimensional simulations. The lattice Boltzmann method is an efficient and effective numerical scheme to analyze the flow in a complicated geometry such as the porous medium.