Simulation-Assisted Determination of the Start-Up Time of a Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cell

Merit Bodner, Željko Penga, Walter Ladreiter, Mathias Heidinger and Viktor Hacker
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Merit Bodner: Institute of Chemical Engineering and Environmental Technology, Graz University of Technology, Inffeldgasse 25C, 8010 Graz, Austria
Željko Penga: Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, University of Split, R. Boškovića 32, 21000 Split, Croatia
Walter Ladreiter: Institute of Chemical Engineering and Environmental Technology, Graz University of Technology, Inffeldgasse 25C, 8010 Graz, Austria
Mathias Heidinger: Institute of Chemical Engineering and Environmental Technology, Graz University of Technology, Inffeldgasse 25C, 8010 Graz, Austria
Viktor Hacker: Institute of Chemical Engineering and Environmental Technology, Graz University of Technology, Inffeldgasse 25C, 8010 Graz, Austria

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 23, 1-20

Abstract: Fuel starvation is a major cause of anode corrosion in low temperature polymer electrolyte fuel cells. The fuel cell start-up is a critical step, as hydrogen may not yet be evenly distributed in the active area, leading to local starvation. The present work investigates the hydrogen distribution and risk for starvation during start-up and after nitrogen purge by extending an existing computational fluid dynamic model to capture transient behavior. The results of the numerical model are compared with detailed experimental analysis on a 25 cm 2 triple serpentine flow field with good agreement in all aspects and a required time step size of 1 s. This is two to three orders of magnitude larger than the time steps used by other works, resulting in reasonably quick calculation times (e.g., 3 min calculation time for 1 s of experimental testing time using a 2 million element mesh).

Keywords: fuel cell start-up; transient CFD simulation; fuel cell degradation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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