Thermal investigation of a PEM fuel cell with cooling flow field

•This paper provides a new way to study temperature distribution of PEM catalyst.•Both electrochemistry and cooling flow field effect were simultaneously simulated.•The study was proposed by heat flux contours & index of uniformity temperature (IUT).•IUT was 24% improved in serpentine cooling channel than parallel one.

Efficient operation of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is hugely dependent on an effective cooling system. Nonuniformity of temperature causes a varying rate of electrochemical reactions at different places causing hot spot formation which decreases the PEM fuel cell lifetime. In this study, PEMFC is simulated with cooling flow field simultaneously. Two conventional serpentine and parallel types of flow field of cooling plates are considered and compared with typical isothermal model (without cooling flow field) used in Ansys Fluent software. This comparison based on effective physical parameters such as pressure drop, the minimum and maximum temperature gradient, Index of uniform temperature (IUT) and etc. In the same working conditions, maximum temperature ratio between parallel and serpentine model is 1.0028 but for index of uniform temperature this study revealed 24% improvement for serpentine cooling flow field than parallel one. The results show that changing the heat transfer rate can be effective on the performance of PEM fuel cell and PEMFC with serpentine cooling flow field compared with parallel one. Serpentine flow field has better cooling performance with regard to effective physical parameters.