Thermoelectric Generator as the Waste Heat Recovery Unit of Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell: A Numerical Study

Hossein Pourrahmani, Hamed Shakeri and Jan Van herle
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Hossein Pourrahmani: Group of Energy Materials, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 1951 Sion, Switzerland
Hamed Shakeri: School of Mechanical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran 16846-13114, Iran
Jan Van herle: Group of Energy Materials, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 1951 Sion, Switzerland

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 9, 1-21

Abstract: The proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is a prominent environmentally friendly alternative candidate to internal combustion engines in automotive applications. The recovery of the waste heat of light-duty diesel engines has been investigated recently, which is similarly relevant for PEMFCs. Thermoelectric generators (TEG) applied on the stack’s walls have been already proposed and tested as a cooling method for small scale applications of the PEMFC. For the medium scale usages of the PEMFC stack, TEG technology may be further used to recover heat lost through the cooling water required for stack thermal management, which was the focus of the present study. Using an agglomerate model for the PEMFC and a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) thermal model for the TEG heat exchanger unit, the operation and performance of the PEMFC stack and heat recovery unit were simulated, respectively. After validation, results indicated that the transferred heat from the PEMFC to the cooling channel increased the temperature of the coolant from room temperature to 330.5 K at the current density of 0.8 A/cm 2 . CFD analysis revealed that 37.7 W of the heated wasted by the PEMFC stack could be recovered by the currently available TEG material and geometry.

Keywords: proton exchange membrane (PEM); agglomerate model; waste heat recovery; thermoelectric generator (TEG); computational fluid dynamic (CFD) (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: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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