Modeling And Optimization Study of PEMFC Fueled With Ammonia Reforming Gas

Abstract

The storage of high-purity hydrogen has been a technical challenge limiting the large-scale application of fuel cells. Ammonia is an ideal hydrogen storage carrier with a storage mass density of up to 17 wt% and can be easily liquefied for storage and transportation, but ammonia requires complex separation equipment to re-generate high-purity hydrogen, which greatly reduces its advantages in hydrogen storage. Therefore, the development of direct ammonia reforming gas fuel cells, which can avoid complicated pure hydrogen separation equipment, has a very meaningful impact and can greatly expand the application of fuel cells. In this paper, we study the modeling simulation of ammonia reforming gas-fueled proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) based on the preliminary experiments, and the concentration-dependent Butler-Volmer electrochemical model is used to simulate the ammonia reforming gas-fueled PEMFC. Firstly, the concentration-dependent Butler-Volmer electrochemical model was improved by adding a correction factor for the concentration difference polarization based on the characteristics of the experimental data to obtain a correction factor of 1.65 based on the experimental data; secondly, the effect of the anode channel length on the fuel cell performance was investigated. The results show that: firstly, the improved concentration-dependent Butler-Volmer electrochemical model can better match the experimental results; secondly, the anode channel length has less effect on the maximum power density and hydrogen concentration in the exhaust gas, and the current density gradient increases with decreasing anode channel length, but the fuel flow resistance decreases. The results of the study can provide a reference for the simulation study of PEMFC using ammonia reforming gas as fuel.