The effect of operating and design parameters on the performance of PEM fuel cells

In this thesis, in the PEM fuel cell which has 1,5 〖cm〗^2active area and consists of a single channel cell, geometry was created by placing 3 different number of obstacles on the anode current collector plate and analysis was performed by using ANSYS Fluent 17.0 module. The boundary conditions and operating parameters have been defined for the single channel computational fluid dynamics model which is formed regarding basic chemical and thermodynamic properties. According to the analysis results of the iteration number in which convergence is obtained,current concentration and power polarization curves for different cell voltages; concentration graphics of pressure, temperature and velocity and curves showing the effects of working pressure have been obtained. The optimum operating parameters for the fuel cell were determined based on the polarization curves indicating the changes. The results were compared with unobstructed single channel fuel cell results. According to the analysis results, there were no significant differences due to the fact that the obstacles were only on one side in the cell model, and the best current and power concentration were obtained in fuel cells with 2 blockage. Optimum battery potential is set at 0.65V and 0.11741 A /〖cm〗^2 current concentration and 0.1221 W /〖cm〗^2 power concentration were obtained at this value. Preventing the flow by blockages has increased efficiency compared to others, but increasing the blockage number has created limitations in the flow area and the lowest effiency was obtained with maxiumum number of blockages.