An efficient method for estimating flow in the serpentine channels and electrodes of PEM fuel cells

This paper presents the development of a simple resistance network model to represent the flow in the serpentine channels and electrodes of PEM fuel cells. The model results are compared to full 3D CFD predictions and reasonable agreement is demonstrated while computational times are reduced from 8 hours to seconds. The CFD results are also used to extract correlations for the pressure losses in the serpentine bends which can be used to alleviate the major shortcoming of the resistance model. As is, the resistance model is linear in velocity and as such is insensitive Re variations, but with the addition of non-linear losses in the bend this will no longer be the case.