Multi-phase micro-scale flow simulation in the electrodes of a PEM fuel cell by lattice Boltzmann method

The gas diffusion layer of a polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell is a porous medium generally made of carbon cloth or paper. The gas diffusion layer has been modeled conventionally as a homogeneous porous medium with a constant permeability in the literature of PEM fuel cell. However, in fact, the permeability of such fibrous porous medium is strongly affected by the fiber orientation having non-isotropic permeability. In this work, the lattice Boltzmann (LB) method is applied to the multi-phase flow phenomenon in the inhomogeneous gas diffusion layer of a PEM fuel cell. The inhomogeneous porous structure of the carbon cloth and carbon paper has been modeled as void space and porous area using Stokes/Brinkman formulation and void space and impermeable fiber distributions obtained from various microscopic images. The permeability of the porous medium is calculated and compared to the experimental measurements in literature showing a good agreement. Simulation results for various fiber distributions indicate that the permeability of the medium is strongly influenced by the effect of fiber orientation. Present lattice Boltzmann flow models are applied to the multi-phase flow simulations by incorporating multi-component LB model with inter-particle interaction forces. The model successfully simulates the complicated unsteady behaviors of liquid droplet motion in the porous medium providing a useful tool to investigate the mechanism of liquid water accumulation/removal in a gas diffusion layer of a PEM fuel cell.