Experimental study and comparison of various designs of gas flow fields to PEM fuel cells and cell stack performance

Hong Liu, Peiwen Li, Daniel Juarez-Robles, Kai Wang, Abel Hernandez-Guerrero

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

58 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this study, a significant number of experimental tests to proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells were conducted to investigate the effect of gas flow fields on fuel cell performance. Graphite plates with various flow field or flow channel designs, from literature survey and also novel designs by the authors, were used for the PEM fuel cell assembly. The fabricated fuel cells have an effective membrane area of 23.5 cm 2 . The results showed that the serpentine flow channel design is still favorable, giving the best single fuel cell performance amongst all the studied flow channel designs. A novel symmetric serpentine flow field was proposed for a relatively large sized fuel cell application. Four fuel cell stacks each including four cells were assembled using different designs of serpentine flow channels. The output power performances of fuel cell stacks were compared and the novel symmetric serpentine flow field design is recommended for its very good performance.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number2
JournalFrontiers in Energy Research
Volume2
Issue numberJAN
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014

Keywords

  • Comparison
  • Experiment
  • Flow field
  • Novel design
  • PEM fuel cell

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
  • Fuel Technology
  • Energy Engineering and Power Technology
  • Economics and Econometrics

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