PEMFCD

The goal of this project is to increase the fundamental understanding of heat and mass transfer processes in proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Such understanding is necessary to further reduce the cost and complexity of a fuel cell system and increase the fuel cell durability. Over the previous years the research group at the Department of Energy Technology has developed a computational model to simulate the flow of reactants and water through the fuel cell using computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and the model possesses some world leading features. During this project the model will be finalized and validated experimentally by conducting experiments on custom made fuel cells from the project partner Hydrogen South Africa (HySA) – Catalysis, and some of the experiments will be conducted in the HySA labs in Cape Town. The second project partner is Dantherm, a world leading manufacturer of fuel cell systems.