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A numerical study on the effects of gas channel wettability in PEM fuel cells

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journal contribution
posted on 2014-08-27, 10:29 authored by Mosab Alrahmani, Rui Chen, Salah Ibrahim, Samir Patel
The wettability of channel walls and gas diffusion layer has a great influence on the water management of fuel cells. In this paper, a numerical study has been carried out to examine the effect of the wall and gas diffusion layer wettability on gas channels. The investigation employed a three dimensional numerical simulation using the volume-of-fluid (VOF) method to simulate the air-water flow in a straight micro-channel representing a gas channel in a PEM fuel cell. Nine combinations of wall and GDL wettabilities were investigated. Different wettability combinations were found to give different water behaviour. For fixed wall wettability, the pattern of the analysed parameters was changing between uniform cyclic, random cyclic and continuous. In addition, it was found that changing the GDL wettability has a greater impact on the analysed parameter compared to changing the wall wettability.

Funding

The Author gratefully acknowledges the support of ANSYS UK LTD and the financial support of PAAET of Kuwait.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering

Published in

ECS Transactions

Volume

48

Issue

1

Pages

81 - 92

Citation

ALRAHMANI, M. ... et al., 2014. A numerical study on the effects of gas channel wettability in PEM fuel cells. ECS Transactions, 48(1), pp.81-92.

Publisher

© The Electrochemical Society

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

© The Electrochemical Society, Inc. 2014. All rights reserved. Except as provided under U.S. copyright law, this work may not be reproduced, resold, distributed, or modified without the express permission of The Electrochemical Society (ECS). This paper was also presented at the 13th International Conference on Advanced Batteries, Accumulators and Fuel Cells (ABAF 2012), August 26-30, Brno, Czech Republic.

ISSN

1938-5862

Language

  • en

Location

US

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