Efficient Numerical Methods for an Anisotropic, Nonisothermal, Two-Phase Transport Model of Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell

We carry out model and numerical studies for a three-dimensional, anisotropic, nonisothermal, two-phase steady state transport model of proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) in this paper. Besides fully addressing the conservation equations of mass, momentum, species, charge and energy equations arising in the PEMFC, we present some efficient numerical methods for this model to achieve a fast and convergent nonlinear iteration, comparing to the oscillatory and nonconvergent iteration conducted by commercial flow solvers or in-house codes with standard finite element/volume method. In a framework of a combined finite element-upwind finite volume method, Kirchhoff transformation plays an important role in dealing with the discontinuous and degenerate water diffusivity in its transport equation. Preconditioned GMRES solver together with Newton’s linearization scheme make the entire numerical simulation more efficient. Three-dimensional numerical simulations demonstrate that the convergent physical solutions can be attained within 30 steps. Numerical convergence tests are also performed to verify the efficiency and accuracy of the presented numerical algorithms and techniques.