A Review of Water Management in Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cells

By M. Ji, Zidong Wei. 2009

388 citations recorded by the source corpus.

At present, despite the great advances in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) technology over the past two decades through intensive research and development activities, their large-scale commercialization is still hampered by their higher materials cost and lower reliability and durability. In this review, water management is given special consideration. Water management is of vital importance to achieve maximum performance and durability from PEMFCs. On the one hand, to maintain good proton conductivity, the relative humidity of inlet gases is typically held at a large value to ensure that the membrane remains fully hydrated. On the other hand, the pores of the catalyst layer (CL) and the gas diffusion layer (GDL) are frequently flooded by excessive liquid water, resulting in a higher mass transport resistance. Thus, a subtle equilibrium has to be maintained between membrane drying and liquid water flooding to prevent fuel cell degradation and guarantee a high performance level, which is the essential problem of water management. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art studies of water management, including the experimental methods and modeling and simulation for the characterization of water management and the water management strategies. As one important aspect of water management, water flooding has been extensively studied during the last two decades. Herein, the causes, detection, effects on cell performance and mitigation strategies of water flooding are overviewed in detail. In the end of the paper the emphasis is given to: (i) the delicate equilibrium of membrane drying vs. water flooding in water management; (ii) determining which phenomenon is principally responsible for the deterioration of the PEMFC performance, the flooding of the porous electrode or the gas channels in the bipolar plate, and (iii) what measures should be taken to prevent water flooding from happening in PEMFCs.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9a1e8edcd8ef88edb9df7d0575c3fc14f1527f79

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Citations in the corpus

Overview of porous media/metal foam application in fuel cells and solar power systems (2018, background): “Balancing the water content in the PEMFC is important for its operation [34].”
Barriers of scaling-up fuel cells: Cost, durability and reliability (2015, background): “Both low durability and reliability are caused by accumulated degradation of materials and catalyst due to water and heat issues [5,43,71,97,106,112].”
Flow Field Patterns for Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (2020, background): “The clogging develops gradually via the (i) single-phase flow with stray water droplets, followed by (ii) droplet flow with stable droplets, (iii) film flowwith continual films of the walls and stable droplets, and finally (iv) slug flow with high water accumulation (Ji and Wei, 2009).”