Pore network modeling of fibrous gas diffusion layers for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells

By J. Gostick, Marios Ioannidis, Michael W. Fowler, M. Pritzker. 2007

346 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A pore network model of the gas diffusion layer (GDL) in a polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell is developed and validated. The model idealizes the GDL as a regular cubic network of pore bodies and pore throats following respective size distributions. Geometric parameters of the pore network model are calibrated with respect to porosimetry and gas permeability measurements for two common GDL materials and the model is subsequently used to compute the pore-scale distribution of water and gas under drainage conditions using an invasion percolation algorithm. From this information, the relative permeability of water and gas and the effective gas diffusivity are computed as functions of water saturation using resistor-network theory. Comparison of the model predictions with those obtained from constitutive relationships commonly used in current PEMFC models indicates that the latter may significantly overestimate the gas phase transport properties. Alternative relationships are suggested that better match the pore network model results. The pore network model is also used to calculate the limiting current in a PEMFC under operating conditions for which transport through the GDL dominates mass transfer resistance. The results suggest that a dry GDL does not limit the performance of a PEMFC, but it may become a significant source of concentration polarization as the GDL becomes increasingly saturated with water.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2bf735bf76af2b0e91d5788230923e05bdd93037

How researchers see this paper

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Aimy Bazylak
2. James Hinebaugh
3. Jürgen Becker
4. Irina Ginzburg
5. Junye Wang

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

1. Aimy Bazylak
2. Junye Wang

Citations in the corpus

• OpenPNM: A Pore Network Modeling Package (2016, background): “The main difference between PNMs and continuum models is how the transport properties between two physical locations in the domain are treated.”
• A multi-scale approach to material modeling of fuel cell diffusion media (2011, methodology): “For instance, modeling approaches with pore networks utilizing connected transport paths with pores and throats and calibrated to real materials by using selected measured material properties, such as porosity or permeability, are used to calculate unknown transport parameters like effective diffusi”