会议专题

Influence of CO2 Bubbles Behavior on the Performance of a Direct Methanol Fuel Cell

To reveal the relation between the behavior of CO2 bubbles in the anode of a direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) and the performance, a numerical simulation program has been developed, and simulations has been done. The Lattice Boltzmann method, which can calculate complex flow fields and multi-component flow, are employed to calculate the two-phase flow of the CO2 bubble and fuel. The model of this simulation includes an anode flow channel, a simplified gas diffusion layer, and a catalyst layer. The result showed that the CO2 bubbles produced at the anode catalyst layer have four patterns depending on the flow rate: (a) the CO2 bubbles occupy the entire anode flow channel, gas diffusion layer, and catalyst layer at low flow rates, (b) they flow down along the stream smoothly at high flow rates, (c) they grow and are ejected periodically at flow rate between (a) and (b), and they (d) are forced back into the gas diffusion layer at over flow rates. To estimate the cell performance, the ratio of the active area on the catalyst layer surface was calculated. In (a), the active area decreases with time and reaches zero. In (b), the active area stabilizes at a nonzero value. In (d), the active area stabilizes some value that is slightly less than the value of (b). This indicates that the simulation would reproduce the experimental result by Hara et al Proc. 2008 Annual Meeting Record IEE Japan-Chugoku, p.146, 2008.

CO2 bubbles direct methanol fuel cells numerical simulation two-phase

Noboru Katayama Yusuke Kudo Sumio Kogoshi

Department of Electrical Engineering, Tokyo University of Science, 2641 Yamazaki, Noda, Chiba, Japan

国际会议

The International Conference on Electrical Engineering 2009(2009 电机工程国际会议)

沈阳

英文

1-6

2009-07-05(万方平台首次上网日期,不代表论文的发表时间)