A novel, state-of-the-art tubular architecture for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells: Performance enhancement, size and cost reduction

Well-designed architectures of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) have recently proved the capability of improving the stack performance and reducing its size. This study introduces a novel tubular multi-channel architecture with exceptional capabilities for PEMFCs. This new design is studied through a well-validated three-dimensional non-isothermal model in Fluent. Comparing the polarization curves shows that the two introduced tubular designs are significantly more efficient than the conventional, flat-shape PEMFC having the same active area. In addition, the tubular cells are considerably smaller in size and require less bipolar plates per unit active area. For these reasons, the tubular shape is superior to the conventional, flat-shape design of PEMFCs. The nesting tubular configuration shows more uniform distribution of oxygen, water, current density and temperature compared to both simple tubular and conventional flat architectures. More importantly, the nesting tubular design also produces significantly higher current density. As a result, the novel nesting tubular architecture enhances the PEMFC performance significantly while reducing its size and cost. The nesting tubular design can therefore be considered one of the best candidates for the next generation of PEMFCs. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.