The uniformity of reaction gas distribution and water drainage performance may be influenced by the flow field structure and the total distance between the inlet and outlet of a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell. Therefore, the design of flow field plates may dominate the performance of fuel cells to some extent. A new kind of flow field plate structure is presented here based upon the principle of bio-inspiration and Murray's law in view of a PEM fuel cell as the object; moreover, numerical simulation is carried out to determine performance. In addition, contour plot comparisons between the bio-inspired and parallel flow fields of the PEM fuel cell indicate that the molar concentration distributions (O2, H2, and H2O) are more even for the bio-inspired design. Pressure and temperature distributions are also compared. The novel flow field plate structure not only improves the uniformity of reaction gas distribution but also reduces the pressure drop through the flow channels, and the maximum output power of the fuel cell with the novel structure rises by 114% under the same conditions and geometric scale compared to the fuel cell with the parallel flow field.

中文翻译：

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PEM燃料电池仿生流场设计新方案的数值研究

质子交换膜（PEM）燃料电池的流场结构和进出口总距离可能会影响反应气体分布的均匀性和排水性能。因此，流场板的设计可能在一定程度上主导燃料电池的性能。以PEM燃料电池为对象，基于生物启发原理和默里定律，提出了一种新型流场板结构；此外，还进行了数值模拟以确定性能。此外，PEM 燃料电池仿生流场和平行流场之间的等高线图比较表明，仿生设计的摩尔浓度分布（O2、H2 和 H2O）更均匀。还比较了压力和温度分布。