Liquid Behavior Across Porous Transport Layer in PEM Fuel Cell Cathode

Liquid water transport inside PEM fuel cells is one of the key challenges for water management in a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell. Investigation of the air-water flow patterns inside fuel cell gas flow channels with porous transport layer (PTL) would provide valuable information that could be used in fuel cell design and optimization. This paper presents a numerical investigation of air-water flow across a PTL with a serpentine channel on PEM fuel cell cathode by use of a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software package FLUENT. Detailed flow patterns with air-water across the porous media were investigated and discussed.