Design and Analysis of Bipolar Plate for 500w Pem Fuel Cell Stack

The PEM Fuel Cell (PEMFC) performance depends on the operating parameters like temperature, pressure, stoichiometric ratio of reactants, relative humidity, back pressure on anode and cathode flow channels, and the design parameters like rib width to channel width (L:C), channel depth, shape of the flow channel and number of pass on the flow channel. The voltage and power produced by single cell was not enough for practical applications, hence number of cells are connected in series or parallel to generate required current and voltage to form a fuel cell stack. The effective performance of fuel cell stack depends upon the satisfactory operation of individual cells. For effective thermal management, water management and distribution of reactants (H2 and o₂) is challengeable task in fuel cell stack. The design of bipolar plate is contributing more in PEM fuel cell stack to meet the above said critical parameters. In this paper numerical investigation of 500w PEM fuel cell stack with each cell of 100 cm² active area with rib to channel width (L:C-2:2) of single pass, three pass and six pass parallel serpentine flow channel with square channel inlet and outlet were carried out. The three dimensional PEMFC stack with various passes (1,3,6) for serpentine flow channel were modeled by pro-e, meshed by ICEM 14.0 software packages and simulated using CFD Fluent 14.0 under various operating pressure range from 1 bar to 2 bar and flow rate of hydrogen and oxygen as 500ml/min and 250ml/min respectively. The numerical modeling results on performance of PEMFC stack has been studied and compared and the better flow channel design was identified.