Numerical Simulation of an Innovative PEM Fuel Cell Stack

This paper describes a novel design approach for a fuel cell stack to address the uniformity of reactant streams and eliminate the bipolar plate to reduce cost, size, volume, and weight. Computational analysis for a novel PEM fuel cell stack and two conventional stacks is conducted. Preliminary results based on a comparison study have shown that eliminating bipolar plates from the fuel cell drastically increases power density, while maintaining uniformity in reactant distribution. Specifically, preliminary case studies suggest that the power density using the novel design is four times that of conventional approaches.