Investigation into Modelling of a Fuel Cell Stack System

Noticing the rise in the electricity prices, worrying about the CO2 emissions and global warming and not sure about living with nuclear power stations, makes everyone think from where energy will come in the coming years. What is needed is a zero-emission distribution generation technology or combination of technologies that allows clean, cost effective supply of energy, on demand on a large scale and in any location. In response a momentous energy revolution is taking place, renewable energy generation or decentralized power systems like wind, photovoltaic, as well as new hydrogen and fuel cells technologies are developing nowadays to take over from fossil hydrocarbons combustion. This paper proposes a model for the simulation and performance evaluation of a polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell generation system. Although other models (Ro and Rahman, 1998) have been produced, the proposed model strength is modularizing the fundamental thermal-physical behaviour of a fuel cell stack to develop a modular block that can be used as a part of any other schematic solution required for fuel cells' study. The developed modular block (prototype) makes the model easy to modify to allow the simulation of any PEMFC with different cell parameters and allows investigation of its behaviour for any operating or design configuration. It is also useful for the study of integration of fuel cells in distribution power systems (which is promising especially to systems with variable output renewable sources as it can store their excess power thus improving the overall system stability). The proposed model exhibits most of the basic fuel cell properties and incorporates essential physical and electrochemical processes that happen along its operation, thus it can be moderated to model any other fuel cell' type. The proposed model prototype was verified and compared to another simplified model [2] by generating sample results for a Ballard V Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) stack. Results indicate that the developed prototype is more accurate in simulating the fuel cell stack and predicting its performance especially for high operating current densities.