Air‐cooled polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) have emerged as a potential power generation source, due to its simple construction and operation. Flow‐field designing for the efficient distribution of reactants is of paramount importance in air‐cooled PEM fuel cells. The requirement of flow fields with uniform distribution amounting to minimal pressure drop across the flow area is necessary for high gas utilization and easy removal of water. Thus, the present work deals with the design of land and pillar flow field type for cathode, and further optimization of its flow pattern. A 3‐D computational fluid dynamics analysis tool for modeling fluid flow was used for simulating the reactant distribution profile and finalizing the flow field design. The effect of flow field design, inlet velocity and inlet ports dimension were studied in order to obtain flow pattern with uniform distribution. The optimized configuration showed higher percentage of flow area (76%) with outlet velocities ranging from 3.0–5.5 m s⁻¹ in relation to inlet velocity of 4.4 m s⁻¹. From the results it was inferred that, with the increase of air inlet velocity and modified flow design, the non‐uniform areas occurring in flow field are reduced leading to uniform air distribution throughout the flow volume.

中文翻译：

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开放式阴极PEM燃料电池的设计与开发– CFD优化流量分析

空冷聚合物电解质膜燃料电池（PEMFC）由于其简单的结构和操作而已成为潜在的发电来源。在空冷PEM燃料电池中，有效分配反应物的流场设计至关重要。对于高气体利用率和易于除水的要求，必须具有均匀分布的流场，以使整个流动区域的压降最小。因此，本工作涉及用于阴极的陆地和支柱流场类型的设计，以及其流型的进一步优化。用于建模流体流动的3D计算流体动力学分析工具用于模拟反应物分布曲线并最终确定流场设计。流场设计的效果，为了获得具有均匀分布的流型，研究了入口速度和入口尺寸。优化配置显示出较高的流量面积百分比（76％），出口速度范围为3.0–5.5 m s^-1相对于入口的4.4毫秒速度^-1。从结果可以推断，随着进气速度的增加和改进的流量设计，流场中出现的不均匀区域减少了，从而导致整个流量中的空气分布均匀。