Volume 9: Sustainable Energy Solutions for Changing the World: Part I

Numerical study on applicability of metal foam as flow distributor in alkaline anion exchange membrane fuel cell Chaochao Cheng, Zhi Liu, Biao Xie, Guobin Zhang, Kui Jiao*

Abstract

In this paper, a three-dimensional multi-phase non-isothermal numerical model is formulated to investigate the applicability of MF (metal foam) as flow distributor in AAEM (alkaline anion exchange membrane) fuel cell. The performance of the cell with MF flow field is compared with that of the cell with traditional channel-rib structure (serpentine channel flow field), the simulation results clearly show that using MF as flow distributor improves the performance greatly, and the improvement gets more and more obvious as the current density increases. The transport and distribution of water (including liquid water, membrane water, and water vapor) and reactants are analyzed to illustrate the performance improvement, and the analysis results agree with the conclusion.

Keywords alkaline anion exchange membrane fuel cell, metal foam, numerical model, water transport, membrane water, liquid saturation