Superiority of a novel conic tubular PEM fuel cell over the conventional cylindrical one

Polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is one of the promising electricity generating technologies; however, it needs further improvements to be commercially viable. The design of a PEMFC plays a key role in its viability. This study proposes a novel conical tubular PEMFC and compares it with the conventional cylindrical tubular one through numerical simulation. The conversion of the cylindrical design into the conical one is done in such a way that the volume of each PEMFC component remains unchanged. The results illustrate the performance superiority of the conical design over the cylindrical one, and show that this superiority increases by increasing the conical angle and holds true for all settings of feeding conditions examined in this study. Moreover, the results indicate that among various feeding parameters, the relative humidity of the inlet reactants has greatest influence on the effectiveness of the proposed shape conversion, and the effectiveness is inversely proportional to the degree of humidification. In the current study, the superiority of the conical design over the cylindrical one in the maximum power is between 4.5% and 11.4% and in the average power is between 2.02% and 8.4%. The paper discusses in detail the reasoning for the mentioned observations.