Validated reduction and accelerated numerical computation of a model for the proton exchange membrane fuel cell

Abstract

Amongst the severest drawbacks of many models for the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) are excessive memory requirements and computing time; consequently, using these for stack modeling is impractical. While reduced models alleviate these difficulties to some extent, most of the available reduced models do not preserve geometrical resolution. In this paper, we present a reduced model for a PEMFC that both reduces computational requirements and preserves geometrical resolution. The model is for a PEMFC equipped with porous flow fields and takes into account conservation of mass, momentum, species, energy, and charge. The results of the reduced model are then verified against those of the full model and validated against global polarization curves and local current-density distributions for three different experimental fuel cells; good agreement is obtained. In computational terms, the solution of the reduced model is found to require between 2 and 3 orders of magnitude less random access memory and execution time than that of the full model; furthermore, it scales well when run on up to four processors. Finally, we discuss the suitability of our reduced model for extension to a PEMFC stack model comprising tens or hundreds of single cells. © 2009 The Electrochemical Society.