Better Electrochemical Performance of PEMFC with a Symmetrical Serpentine Flow Field Bipolar Plate

Proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) has drawn widely attention as a promising power generation device. The structure design of flow field for bipolar plate is closely related to the output performance and service life of PEMFC. In this paper, a novel symmetrical serpentine flow field (SSFF) was proposed for improving mass transfer capability of the conventional serpentine flow field(CSFF). A single PEMFC with the SSFF bipolar plate was designed and studied. Two three-dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models for the PEMFC with the CSFF bipolar plate and the SSFF bipolar plate were established based on CFD method. And then, numerical simulations were conducted using the FLUENT PEM fuel cell module. In addition, the electrochemical performance test was performed for the PEMFC with SSFF bipolar plate. The simulated results indicate that the PEMFC with SSFF bipolar plate had better oxygen transportation and better water removal than the PEMFC with CSFF bipolar plate. The results of both simulation and test show that the PEMFC with SSFF bipolar plate had better electrochemical performance than the PEMFC with CSFF bipolar plate. Specially, the maximum power density of the PEMFC was enhanced by 22.9% by adopting the SSCF bipolar plate.