The Air Flow Distributions within a Typical Planar Protonic Ceramic Fuel Cell Stack

With the in-depth research of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), the advantages of the protonic ceramic fuel cell (PCFC) have been paid more and more attentions. In this paper, three-dimensional calculated fluid dynamics model was built to investigate the fluidity within a typical PCFC stack. The result shown that for a typical PCFC stack, the air mass flow rate fed to the piled layers would keep decreasing with the increasing cell number index, while the inlet and outlet manifolds had similar cross section areas. Extending the length of the membrane electrode assemblies (MEA) would slightly improve the air flow distribution uniformity. The air flow and species distributions among the rib channels would be determined by the sites of the entrances and exits of the manifolds. and the solid rib configuration over porous cathodes. The vapor mole fraction distribution over the dense electrolyte surface had apparently oppositely with the rib channel configuration, because two mole vapors were generated while one mole oxygen is consumed. Different from the O-SOFC stack, the vapor removing capacity would be an important factor for evaluating the quality of the cathode side flow path structure.