Effect of the number and area of channels on the performance of rectangular, triangular and elliptical channel geometry PEM fuel cells

The performance of a PEM fuel cell is an important parameter that can be expressed with the polarization curve of it. In this study a complete three-dimensional and single phase model is used to investigate the effect of increasing the number of serpentine channels in the bipolar plates and also increasing the area (depth) of channels of a PEM fuel cell with rectangular, triangular and elliptical cross-section geometry. The proposed model is a full cell model, which includes all the parts of the PEM fuel cell, flow channels, gas diffusion electrodes, catalyst layers and the membrane. The results show that there are good agreement with the numerical results and experimental results of the previous work of authors. Also the results show that by increasing the number of channels from one to four and eight, the performance improved about 18% and by decreasing the area of channels from to the performance improved about 13%.

PEM fuel cell, elliptical channel, rectangular channel, numerical modeling, current density