Water Droplet Dynamic Behavior in a Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell by LatticeBoltzmann Method

Proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is believed by many as the most viable alternative to heat engines or ordinary batteries in automotive, stationary, and portable power applications. However, a major issue in the application of PEMFCs is water management with the flooding of electrodes as an example. Several investigations have been conducted on numerical modeling of water transport in PEMFC electrodes. Lattice-Boltzmann method (LBM) is a relatively new modeling technique for complex fluid systems and has attracted interest from researchers in computational mechanics. Due to its particulate nature and local dynamics, LBM has several advantages over other conventional CFD methods, especially in dealing with complex boundaries, considering non-homogenous and non-isotropic transport properties, parallelization of the algorithm, and modeling multi-phase fluid flow in a porous medium. In this study, a water droplet is placed underneath the land of a ۲D PEMFC electrode with interdigitated flow field, and its dynamic behavior under various contact angles and inlet air velocities is modeled using Shan and Chen multi-component, multi-phase LBM. A FORTRAN computer program was developed and parallelized based on OpenMP in order to implement the proposed model. The results show considerable influences of contact angle and inlet air velocity on the water droplet dynamic behavior.

کلیدواژه ها:

Droplet dynamic behavior ، PEMFC ، Contact angle ، Lattice-Boltzmann method