Comparison of PEMFC performance with parallel serpentine and parallel serpentine-baffled flow fields under various operating and geometrical conditions; a parametric study

Optimal flow channel design of a fuel cell is crucial to further improve the performance of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). In this work, a comprehensive parametric study was conducted to analyze the performance of a PEMFC with conventional parallel serpentine flow fields (PSFF) and parallel serpentine-baffled flow fields (PSBFF). A three-dimensional two-phase computational fluid dynamics model was used to numerically simulate the fuel cell performance. The effects of operating parameters such as pressure, temperature, and stoichiometric ratio, as well as the geometric parameters of channel height to channel width ratio and rib width to channel width ratio for both flow fields on fuel cell performance were investigated. The results show that as pressure, temperature, and stoichiometric ratio increase, cell performance increases for both flow fields, with a more substantial rate of improvement for the PSBFF design. A 16.1% improvement in cell performance at an operating pressure of 1 atm, a 19.9% improvement at a cell temperature of 70 °C, and a 16.1% improvement at a stoichiometric ratio of 2 were obtained when PSBFF was used instead of PSFF. By increasing the channel height and rib width, the cell performance for PSBFF remains almost constant due to the improved forced convection of the gas mixture and the reduction in concentration loss, while the cell performance for PSFF decreases significantly. At the largest channel height to channel width ratio of 1.5 and rib width to channel width ratio of 1.315 studied in this work, an improvement in cell performance of 53.3% and 58.5%, respectively, was achieved when PSBFF was used instead of PSFF. In addition, PSBFF was more effective in removing water from the porous zones than PSFF under all conditions.