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Numerical simulation of liquid water behavior in microchannel with a 90° bend

conference contribution
posted on 2014-08-21, 13:23 authored by Mosab Alrahmani, Rui Chen, Salah Ibrahim
Water management is an effective way of improving Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell performance and durability. Changing the wettability of gas channel walls and gas diffusion layer (GDL) is one way of controlling the water management in a fuel cell for its influence on the liquid water dynamic behavior. The objective of this study is to investigate liquid water dynamic behavior in a microchannel with a 90° bend and different surface wettability combinations through 3-D numerical simulation. Volume-of-fluid (VOF) method was employed to track the fluid-fluid interface in the multiphase flow. The simulated microchannel has a square cross-section with a dimension of 0.25 mm and a total length of 1.5 mm. Water is introduced to the channel via two pores in the bottom surface representing a GDL while air flows from one end to another. The air and water velocities used are in the order of magnitude of a high current density fuel cell. Nine different combinations of wall/GDL wettability are investigated. The results show that liquid water takes less time to leave the channel in a hydrophilic GDL compared to moderate and hydrophobic GDL regardless of wall wettability. Furthermore, the GDL wettability shows more significant impact on liquid water behavior compared to the wall wettability; however, wall wettability has a slight but considerable impact.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering

Published in

ASME 2013 11th Int. Conf. on Fuel Cell Science, Eng. and Technology Collocated with the ASME 2013 Heat Transfer Summer Conf. and the ASME 2013 7th Int. Conf. on Energy Sustainability, FUELCELL 2013

Citation

ALRAHMANI, M., CHEN, R. and IBRAHIM, S., 2013. Numerical simulation of liquid water behavior in microchannel with a 90° bend. In: 2011 13th ASME International Conference on Fuel Cell Science, Engineering and Technology, Minneapolis, USA, 14-19 July, V001T03A006.

Publisher

© ASME

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

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

2013

ISBN

9780791855522

Language

  • en

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