A Novel Tubular Shape Design for Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) to Enhance the Performance

The Polymer Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell set is an efficient system that can transform hydrogen energy into an electrical one. Due to higher power density, the tubular shape is the preferred architecture among the different architectures over the conventional one. Therefore, new and more efficient architectures for tubular shapes are introduced in the current study. Thus, numerical and 3D simulations are performed to forespeak the mass transfer and distribution, and the achieved current density of the PEMFC. Two diverse cases are assumed, case 1 has two gas flow channels on each side of the anode and cathode, and case 2 has four channels on each side. The equations of flow and solid bipolar domains are discretized and solved using Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) methods to obtain the species, current density, liquid water amounts, and temperature distribution. The extracted results indicate that case 2, can enhance the convective mass transfer and can transport species from the channel to the reaction area more uniformly due to lower concentration loss. The higher performance of case 2 leads to an augmented concentration of H2O in the cathode Gas Diffusion Layer (GDL). However, these new architectures can enhance the output current density, especially in case 2, by 26% in lower voltages at the same conditions.