Heat and Water Management in a PEM Fuel Cell

Proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells are promising power-generation sources for m obile and stationary applications. In this paper a non-isothermal, single-domain and two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics model is presented to investigate heat and water transfer in a PEM fuel cell. A set of governing equations, conservation of mass, momentum, species, energy and charge for gas channels, gas diffusion layers, catalyst layers and the membrane regions are considered. These equations are solved numerically in a single domain, using finite-volume-based computational fluid dynamics technique. This model accounts for the major transport phenomena in a PEM fuel cell: convective and diffusive heat and mass transfer, electrode kinetics, and potential fields. The results are shown to be in good agreement with previous work and it is validated with recent experimental data available