Performance study on cooling channel of PEMFC stack integrated with shrinkable honeycomb structure

• Published in: Applied thermal engineering 2025-03, Vol.262, p.125267, Article 125267
• Main Authors: Chen, Xi, Hu, Shenglin, Luo, Yan, Gu, Bin, You, Shuhai, Lu, Weidong, Zhao, Bin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cooling plate; PEMFC; Shrinkable honeycomb flow channel; TUI
• ISSN: 1359-4311
• DOI: 10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2024.125267

•Shrinkable honeycomb structure is proposed for enhancing PEMFC cooling performance.•Performance comparison of PEMFC using different cooling flow fields is conducted.•Performance of cooling pipe network with 10-cell PEMFC stack is investigated. A significant amount of heat is generated by chemical reactions during the operation of proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) stack, which can have a detrimental effect on the membrane electrode and PEMFC performance. A shrinkable honeycomb-structured cooling channel was proposed in this study to enhance the cooling performance and temperature uniformity in PEMFC. The maximum temperature, temperature uniformity, planar temperature difference, and pressure drop were evaluated for different cooling channel designs (parallel, serpentine, honeycomb, and shrinkable honeycomb). The results show that the shrinkable honeycomb channel is better than the conventional designs, with the maximum temperature drops to 333.2 K. A 10-cell PEMFC stack with shrinkable honeycomb cooling design exhibits a more uniform temperature distribution compared to the conventional parallel configuration, with a 3.2 K reduction in maximum temperature. In the U-type and Z-type configurations, the maximum temperature of U-type is 355.2 K, which is 3.3 K lower than the Z-type, with a 0.9 kPa reduction in pressure drop. Further improvement in cooling performance is achieved by adjusting the manifold size, which reduces the stack maximum temperature to 350.6 K.