A Factorial Study to Investigate the Purging Effect on the Performance of a Dead‐End Anode PEM Fuel Cell Stack

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental investigation of the effect of hydrogen purging time period and duration on the performance of a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell stack with a dead-end anode. The objective is to develop a better understanding of the interactions between the purging parameters and the cathode air-stoichiometry. It employs a full factorial approach for three factors (purging period, purging duration and air-stoichiometry) with two levels and three replications. The study is performed on a 300 cm 2 , 24-cell PEM fuel cell stack with the rated power of 1.5 kW. The stack was operated with water cooling, fully humidified air and dry hydrogen at the ambient pressure. The results showed that the stack performance is significantly influenced by the interactions of the purging parameters and the cathode air-stoichiometry. The least square model was utilized to determine the optimum values of these parameters with regard to the stack performance and hydrogen utilization. For the present stack, the optimum values of parameters were: purging period of 3 min, purging duration of 4 s and the cathode air-stoichiometry of 200%.

Remodeling of a commercial plug-in battery electric vehicle to a hybrid configuration with a PEM fuel cell

“…Another filter (CA1) was also placed in the line in order to collect the impurities dragged by the recirculated gas. Impurities (water and nitrogen) are eventually eliminated from this filter by purges performed at a given frequency depending on the current demanded to the stack [25][26][27][28]. The recirculation system is passive, and does not imply any power consumption.…”

Study on Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells with Nonhumidification Using Metal Foam in Dead-Ended Operation

“…Most existing studies on dead-ended operation systems have focused on their operating conditions [21][22][23][24][25][26] and optimizing purging strategies [27][28][29][30]. Yang et al [31] compared the performance of dead-ended systems according to channel-type flow fields.…”

Simplified anode architecture for PEMFC systems based on alternative fuel feeding: Experimental characterization and optimization for automotive applications

“…Both phenomena can even result in irreversible degradations [5,7,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. In order to mitigate the effect of flooding and N2 stratification, the anodic purge strategy was extensively studied [16,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32] and often, frequent purges are recommended. However, this increases the hydrogen losses, impeding the system efficiency.…”