Marco Sauermoser, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Implementation and optimisation of tree-shaped flow field patterns for PEM fuel cells

The flow field plates in fuel cells still have potential for optimization, which can lead to an increase in the fuel cell performance, one of the targets set by the U.S. Department of Energy. One way to optimize this flow field plate is, to develop a flow pattern, which diminishes the drawbacks from the current industry standards like serpentine and parallel patterns, such as non-uniform reactant distribution and water management problems. For this reason, a fractal tree-shaped flow pattern, inspired by biological transportation networks, was picked, enabling us to achieve a uniform distribution of reactants in the fuel cell and increasing its performance. The diameters of the channels in the bifurcations were related by the Murray’s law providing minimal entropy production. The aim of this seminar is to introduce fuel cell technology including current industry standards and the experimental and computational methods used to verify any improvements by using such a tree-shaped flow pattern. New results of simulations of these patterns, done in COMSOL, will be presented.