Impacts of reactant flow nonuniformity on fuel cell performance and scaling-up: Comprehensive review, critical analysis and potential recommendations

Fuel Cells (FCs) have witnessed phenomenal improvements in operation and utilization for different stationary and mobile applications. Scaling up limitations of FCs and their inte-gration restrictions into high energy applications because of maldistribution of the re -actants' (fuel and oxidant) flow become among the major drawbacks. The relevant non -uniform electrochemical reactions may result in the FC performance degradation and decrease in lifetime. Therefore, this paper aims at introducing a comprehensive review on the advances in the methods of flow distribution in FCs. The levels in FC design either individual cell or FC stack that introduce non-uniformities are highlighted. The negative impacts on the FC performance, mainly the thermal and water management aspects, have been explicitly introduced. The consequent phenomena the FC experiences such as non -uniform heating, water flooding and membrane drying are presented. Based on the literature review, the critical insights and recommendations are provided alongside a suggestion of a cellular level flow distributor design to be investigated in future studies. (c) 2020 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.