Search Results

Activation loss, mass transfer loss and ohmic loss are the three main voltage losses of the polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell. While the former two types are relevant to concentration of oxygen in catalyst layer and the later one is associated with the water content in membrane. Distributions of water content and oxygen in a single cell are inconsistent which cause that current densities in each segment of the single cell are different. For the dry inlet gas, the water in the segments near the gas inlet channel will be carried to the segments near the gas outlet channel, which causes high ohmic loss of the segments near the gas inlet channel. In this work, a transfer non-isothermal quasi-three-dimensional model is developed to investigate inconsistency of current densities.