Investigation of purge time in cathodic dead-end mode PEMFC

Document Type : Full Lenght Research Article

Authors

1 School of Mechanical Engineering, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Iran

2 School of Mechanical Engineering, Amol Islamic Azad University, Iran

Abstract

 Recently, special type of fuel cells has been developed that operates in a Dead End mode. Working in this condition, the Dead-End fuel cell is supplied with
hydrogen almost at the same rate of consumption. It is noteworthy to mention that
all of the water transport mechanisms have been considered in this simulation.
Water accumulation that is directly proportional to the cell current is of a great
importance and has a negative impact on the cell voltage and its performance.
Hence, water and gas management in Dead-End mode should be handled properly.
To do so, determining the suitable time of purge and its duration is valuable with a
direct impact on cell performance. In this paper, the channel and gas diffusion layer
have been considered as a single control volume and the blockage effect has been
investigated by means of thermodynamic analysis. In order to obtain a reasonable
assumption, we have studied three different scenarios: GDL flooding, channel
flooding and GDL-channel flooding simultaneously. The influence of blockage
effect rate of gas diffusion layer and channel on cell voltage drop, performance and
purge time have been studied. Voltage drop curves in different operating conditions
have been presented and the results show an acceptable agreement with
experimental studies. These curves have been investigated for different current
densities (0.5, 1 and 1.5 A/cm2), active areas (25, 50 and 100 cm2) and
temperatures (60-80 °C).An Increase in temperature and in current density, reduces
purge time interval, while increasing active area has an inverse impact. In high
current densities, the effect of temperature variation can be neglected.

Keywords

References

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History

  • Receive Date: 11 October 2013
  • Revise Date: 06 July 2014
  • Accept Date: 17 September 2014

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