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A comparison of evaporative and liquid cooling methods for fuel cell vehicles

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-07-08, 08:51 authored by Ashley FlyAshley Fly, Rob Thring
Despite having efficiencies higher than internal combustion engines, heat rejection from fuel cells remains challenging due to lower operating temperatures and reduced exhaust heat flow. This work details a full system simulation which is then used to compare a conventional liquid cooled fuel cell system to two types of evaporatively cooled fuel cell systems. Both steady state and transient operation are considered. Results show the radiator frontal area required to achieve thermal and water balance for an evaporatively cooled system with an aluminium condensing radiator is 27% less than a conventional liquid cooled system at 1.25 A/cm2 steady state operation. The primary reason for the reduction is higher heat transfer coefficients in the condensing radiator due to phase change. It is also shown that the liquid water separation efficiency has a significant influence on the required radiator frontal area of the evaporatively cooled system.

Funding

This work has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant number EP/ G037116/1.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering

Published in

International Journal of Hydrogen Energy

Volume

41

Issue

32

Pages

14217 - 14229

Citation

FLY, A. and THRING, R.H., 2016. A comparison of evaporative and liquid cooling methods for fuel cell vehicles. International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, 41 (32), pp. 14217-14229.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC.

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-06-07

Publication date

2016-06-28

Notes

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

ISSN

0360-3199

Language

  • en

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