Wednesday, March 23rd, 2022. Time: 12 noon

Blended learning - Place: O.C. Zienkiewicz Conference Room, C1 Building, UPC Campus Nord, Barcelona

Link for online session: https://meet.google.com/qjo-sttx-dgo

See the video on Youtube

ABSTRACT

Polymer electrolyte fuel cell (PEFC) vehicles have already met most customer requirements including long range, quick refuelling and start-up at sub-zero temperatures. However, PEFCs are still too expensive for large scale commercialization, and further cost reductions could be achieved by operating at higher current densities at reduced Pt loading. High current density operation results in increased water production that accumulates over time in the porous cell structure, blocking fuel and reactant transport and shutting down the cell. In order to analyze fuel cell architectures and strategies that mitigate accumulation in PEFCs, pore level imaging, analysis and simulation tools to study multi-phase flow transport; and, volume-averaged transient, multi-phase, non-isothermal PEFC models have been developed in the open-source software OpenFCST.

Figure 1. Simulated water accumulation in a porous transport layer (left, white solid, orange liquid water, colour oxygen mole fraction in gas phase); Simulated (middle) and experimentally observed (right) transient current density oscillations due to water accumulation

These tools can now be used to predict how water accumulates in varying electrode micro-structures, and combined to generate a comprehensive numerical model that accounts for water accumulation over time at multiple spatial scales. This presentation aims at highlighting recent advances in micro- and macro-scale multi-phase flow simulation tools and how, when combined with detailed experimental validation, they can be used to gain insight into the physical processes inside the fuel cell, such as water accumulation in catalyst layer with varying pore size distribution, water dynamics in the membrane, and the role of microporous layers on mitigating water accumulation in the electrode.

SPEAKER CV

Marc Secanell is an full professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta, Canada, and the director of the Energy Systems Design Laboratory. His research interests are in the areas of: a) analysis and computational design of energy systems, such as polymer electrolyte fuel cells, polymer electrolyzers, flywheels and cooling towers, b) fabrication and characterization of polymer electrolyte fuel cells and electrolyzers, c) finite element analysis, and d) multidisciplinary design optimization. His current research projects include the development of the Open-source Fuel Cell Simulation Toolbox (OpenFCST), an open-source framework to analyze fuel cells, the development of mathematical models and optimization strategies for cooling towers and high-speed composite flywheels, and on the fabrication and characterization of low loading polymer electrolyte fuel cells, and high-speed composite flywheels. He is the author of numerous journal articles, which received 3358 citations (h-index: 34 in Google Scholar).

See Seminar Programme 2022