Three-Dimensional Modeling of a Medium Size PEM Fuel Cell Stack: Thermal Effects and Electrical Performance

In this extended abstract we describe self-consistent computational methodology developed to solve various engineering challenges arising during design and development of proton-exchange membrane based (PEM) fuel cell stacks. We extracted fundamental building block of the cell and developed several models, consistent with various levels of physical understanding of underlying mechanisms. Our proposed approach, when applied consistently allows relating global (cell and stack) and micro (individual channel) scale performances. This can be done for both thermo-flow and electrochemical parameters. We here report work-in-progress results. When research will be fully completed several sets of tabulated parameters and manual of fuel cell computations will be produced. CFD-ACE+ software package (CFDRC, Huntsville, AL) was used in this study.