Comparison between CFD Analysis and Experiments According to Various PEMFC Flow-field Designs

Flow-field design has much influence over the performance of proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) because it affects the pressure magnitude and distribution of the reactant gases. To obtain the pressure magnitude and distribution of reactant gases in five kinds of flow-field designs, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis was performed. After the CFD analysis, a single cell test was carried out to obtain the performance values. As expected, the pressure differences due to different flow-field configurations were related to the PEMFC performance because the actual performance results showed the same tendency as the results of the CFD analysis. A large pressure drop resulted in high PEMFC performance. The single serpentine configuration gave the highest performance because of the high pressure difference magnitudes of the inlet/outlet. On the other hand, the parallel flow-field configuration gave the lowest performance because the pressure difference between inlet and outlet was the lowest.