Effects of Clamping Pressure on Cold Start Behavior of Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells

Abstract

Understanding the cold start process of polymer electrolyte fuel cell (PEFC) is crucial to the development of an advanced PEFC of good cold start performance or to the design of advanced cold start strategies. In this study, a three‐dimensional cold start model has been adapted and further developed to numerically investigate the cold start behavior under the applied clamping pressure, which was not considered in previous cold start modeling and simulation work. The PEFC cold start performance is studied under various assembly pressures in terms of polarization curves, ice formation, water content profile, and current density distribution, etc. The results indicate that, using a large clamping pressure leads to a significant decline on the cold start performance; therefore, using an optimum clamping pressure is important to obtain a better cold start performance. It is found that increasing the clamping pressure not only increases the ice accumulation in cathode catalyst layer, but also causes the dehydration of membrane and decreases the cold start performance. The proposed model can be used as a powerful tool to study the realistic cold start performance of PEFC and to assist the development of more advanced PEFC cold start strategies.

Effect of Dual Porous Layers with Patterned Wettability on Low-Temperature Start Performance of Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cell

“…Energies 2020, 13,3529 3 of 16 conventional and hybrid MPL were investigated and the adequate assembly pressure was decided for the experiment. The low-temperature start ability of a PEMFC with the dual hybrid structure was compared with those of PEMFCs with the single hybrid MPL structure and a conventional MPL and GDL structure under the optimum assembly pressure.…”

Effect of cathode catalytic and micro-porous layer contact pressure distribution on proton exchange membrane fuel cell cold-start performance

“…The water movement in the cathode is related to the gap between the cathode CL and MPL, which is substantially impacted by the pressure with which the fuel cell is assembled. Dafalla [10] studied the influence of assembly pressure on characteristics such as the current distribution and fuel cell cold-start performance by establishing a three-dimensional mathematical model. The results demonstrated that increasing the clamping pressure during assembly not only increased ice accumulation in the cathode CL but also caused the membrane to dehydrate and decreased the cold-start performance.…”

The influences of gas diffusion layer material models and parameters on mechanical analysis of proton exchange membrane fuel cell

“…The performance and reliability of PEMFC are not only dependent on materials and structure designs utilized, but also decided by the assembly conditions. Insufficient assembly pressure would cause higher interfacial contact resistance (ICR) and thermal contact resistance (TCR), whereas excessive assembly pressure may lead to mass transfer problems, or even the damage and failure of fuel cell components [4,5]. The ICR between GDL and BPP is one of the main reasons for ohmic losses and fuel cell performance reduction.…”