Investigation of Water Management Dynamics on the Performance of a Ballard-Mark-V Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell Stack System

Fuel cells are found to be the most promising source for the future era to meet out the energy demands. This is due to its green and clean energy production which increases the fuel cell research and development studies. This paper aims to bring out the importance of water management in a Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) stack system. At present several electrochemical models are available that predicts the steady state behavior for a specified set of operating conditions. However, such models have neglected the effect of water management dynamics on the polarization and performance characteristics. Hence a novel semi-empirical fuel cell dynamic model has been developed in a MATLAB/SIMULINK environment which predicts the complete transient and dynamic phenomena of the stack that incorporates the effect of membrane flooding and hydration/dehydration. The effect of water management dynamics over the system behavior is investigated and validated with the benchmark data obtained from a Ballard-Mark-V 5kW PEM fuel cell stack system. The results obtained show that the model responses fit well with the experimental results. Moreover, the model can predict the dynamic and transient response of stack voltage/power under a sudden change in load current. The developed model can be used to optimize the stack performance in terms of water management which facilitates in developing an optimized structural design of the fuel cell stack system for its scale-up.