Investigating Inlet Condition Effects on PEMFC GDL Liquid Water Transport through Pore Network Modeling. Issue 7 (1st April 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Fazeli, M.; Hinebaugh, J.; Bazylak, A.
• Is Part Of: Journal of the Electrochemical Society. Volume 162:Issue 7(2015)
• Page Start: F661
• Page End: F668
• Publication Date: 2015-04-01
• Subjects: Gas diffusion layer -- Inlet boundary conditions -- Pore network modelling; Electrochemistry -- Periodicals; 541.3705
• DOI: 10.1149/2.0191507jes
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0013-4651

Abstract

Abstract : In this work, the influence of the liquid water inlet boundary conditions at the gas diffusion layer (GDL)/catalyst layer interface on the spatial distribution of liquid water within the GDL was studied. We used pore network modeling with invasion percolation to simulate liquid water transport in a commercially available GDL, where the detailed, 3D microstructure of the GDL was obtained through X-ray imaging. Three inlet boundary conditions were studied: uniform pressure (single reservoir), uniform flux (completely discretized reservoirs), and distributed uniform pressure (random spatial- and size-distributions of reservoirs). We presented the distributed uniform pressure boundary condition as a more realistic inlet, where inlets are randomly distributed reservoirs that are connected to multiple inlet pores. It was found that the overall saturation ranged from 6% to 28% when the number of inlets ranged from 20 to 300; however, the GDL/catalyst layer delamination dominated water transport behavior.