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AIChE_water breakthroughFinal submission version.pdf (3.34 MB)

Simulation of liquid water beakthrough in a nano-tomography reconstruction of a carbon paper gas diffusion layer

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journal contribution
posted on 2011-05-04, 15:06 authored by Pratap Rama, Yu Liu, Rui Chen, Hossein Ostadi, Kyle Jiang, Yuan Gao, Xiaoxian Zhang, Rosemary Fisher, Michael Jeschke
This study reports the feasibility of newly simulating liquid water intrusion into the porous gas diffusion layer (GDL) of a polymer electrolyte fuel cell (PEFC) using X-ray nano-tomography and two-phase lattice Boltzmann (LB) simulation. A digital 3D model of the GDL is reconstructed using X-ray nanotomography while two-phase porous flow is simulated at two different levels of surface wettability by applying a newly-developed numerical LB model. The results show liquid infiltration in a hydrophobic GDL is comparatively lower (pore saturation of 0.11 to 0.90) than that for a hydrophilic GDL (pore saturation of 0.36 to 0.96) over the liquid intrusion range of 1 kPa . 100 kPa. Visualisation of simulated results in three dimensions reveal dissimilar liquid infiltration characteristics for the two levels of wettability considered, yet also reveal a general breakthrough of liquid water at a pressure of 10 kPa due to specific structural features of the GDL.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering

Citation

RAMA, P. ... et al, 2012. Simulation of liquid water beakthrough in a nano-tomography reconstruction of a carbon paper gas diffusion layer. AIChe Journal, 58 (2), pp. 646-655.

Publisher

Wiley (© American Institute of Chemical Engineers)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publication date

2012

Notes

This is a preprint of an article published in the AIChe Journal [© American Institute of Chemical Engineers]. The published version can be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/aic.12581

ISSN

1547-5905

Language

  • en