figshare
Browse
energies-12-01186-v2.pdf (8.97 MB)

Liquid water transport in porous metal foam flow-field fuel cells: a two-phase numerical modelling and ex-situ experimental study

Download (8.97 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2019-04-09, 08:17 authored by Ashley FlyAshley Fly, Kyoungmi Kim, John GordonJohn Gordon, Daniel ButcherDaniel Butcher, Rui Chen
Proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) using porous metallic foam flow-field plates have been demonstrated as an alternative to conventional rib and channel designs, showing high performance at high currents. However, the transport of liquid product water through metal foam flow-field plates in PEMFC conditions is not well understood, especially at the individual pore level. In this work, ex-situ experiments are conducted to visualise liquid water movement within a metal foam flow-field plate, considering hydrophobicity, foam pore size and air flow rate. A two-phase numerical model is then developed to further investigate the fundamental water transport behaviour in porous metal foam flow-field plates. Both the experimental and numerical work demonstrate that unlike conventional PEMFC channels, air flow rate does not have a strong influence on water removal due to the high surface tensions between the water and foam pore ligaments. A hydrophobic foam was seen to transport liquid water away from the initial injection point faster than a hydrophilic foam. In ex-situ tests, liquid water forms and maintains a random preferential pathway until the flow-field edge is reached. These results suggest that controlled foam hydrophobicity and pore size is the best way of managing water distribution in PEMFCs with porous flow-field plates.

Funding

This research was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant number EP/M023508/1 and EP/L015749/1, supported by the International Collaborative Energy Technology R&D Program of the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) and granted financial resources from the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, Republic of Korea (No. 20148520120160).

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering

Published in

Energies

Volume

12

Citation

FLY, A. ... et al., 2019. Liquid water transport in porous metal foam flow-field fuel cells: a two-phase numerical modelling and ex-situ experimental study. Energies, 12(7): 1186.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by MDPI AG

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2019-03-26

Publication date

2019-03-27

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by MDPI under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

1996-1073

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Licence

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC