Pore-scale modeling of fluid flow through gas diffusion and catalyst layers for high temperature proton exchange membrane (HT-PEM) fuel cells

This work represents a step towards reliable algorithms for reconstructing micro-morphology of electrode materials of high-temperature protonexchange membrane fuel cells and for performing pore-scale simulations of fluid flow (including rarefaction effects). In particular, we developed a deterministic model for a woven gas diffusion layer (GDL) and a stochastic model for the catalyst layer (CL) based on clusterization of carbon particles. We verified that both developed models accurately recover the experimental values of permeability, without any special ad-hoc tuning. Moreover, we investigated the effect of catalyst particle distributions inside the CL on the degree of clusterization and on the microscopic fluid flow, which is relevant for degradation modelling (e.g. loss of phosphoric acid). The three-dimensional pore-scale simulations of fluid flow for the direct numerical calculation of ∗Corresponding author Email addresses: [email protected] (Uktam R. Salomov), [email protected] (Eliodoro Chiavazzo), [email protected] (Pietro Asinari) URL: http://staff.polito.it/pietro.asinari/ (Pietro Asinari), http://www.polito.it/small (Pietro Asinari) Preprint submitted to Computers and Mathematics with Applications August 26, 2013 permeability were performed by the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM).