Multi-Scale Modeling of Transports inside PEMFC By Combining Multi-Phase CFD Fuel Cell Model with Lattice Boltzmann Method
Authors: Shimpalee Sirivatch , Hirano Shinichi , Lu Zijie , Satjaritanun Pongsarun , Ogawa Shohei , Litster Shawn , Khunatorn Yottana , Weidner John W. 
Published: February 2020

The objective of this work is to gain the mechanical understanding of the water management in the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). Water is a by-product of the fuel cell reaction and its amount is proportion to the current of fuel cell output. Water is used to retain the proper hydration level in the PEM. At the same time, condensed water in the flowfield and the gas diffusion layer (GDL) reduces oxygen transport to the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) area. Therefore, excess accumulation of condensed water causes to lower the performance, particularly at the higher current densities. Detailed simulation of two-phase water in the GDL is significantly important to understand the water management.

This work shows the successful in development of a multi-scale calculation technique that incorporates various scales of numerical model in a fuel cell and simultaneously performed a prediction. The outcomes of this work are, (i) development of two-phase fluid model in the micro-scale porous structure of GDL, and (ii) integration of this micro-scale GDL fluid model with a state-of-the-art macro-scale flowfield fluid model to predict two-phase water in the fuel cell. Figure 1 gives the concept of modeling approach at each component of the fuel cell. The flowfield in the bipolar plate and MEA models are calculated using traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method with existing PEMFC model [1-3]. The two-phase fluid in the micro-scale porous structure of GDL is numerically predicted by Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) [4-5]. The solution of each iteration from CFD and LBM are required to simultaneously exchange for the next iteration until all solutions are converged, especially at the interfaces. In this figure, it shows the flowfield is transformed into the macro-scale CFD model and the image of detail structured GDL is converted into micro-scale LBM model. Actual porous structure imaging of GDL is obtained by the nano-scale high special resolution x-ray computed tomography. Figure 2 shows an example of the predictions from the simulation when the macroscopic flowfield model is combined with the microscopic GDL model while performing the calculation. The predictions give the detail distributions of variables in every components of the multiscale model. In this figure, the current density distribution on MEA surface, the liquid water transport inside the GDL, and the temperature of solid and fluid phases inside the GDL are presented.

References:

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Figure 1