PERFORMANCE SIMULATIONS OF PROTON EXCHANGE MEMBRANE FUEL CELLS IN DIFFERENT TEMPERATURE AND MOISTURE CONDITIONS

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells are becoming more relevant especially in the automotive sector given the new transition underway towards electric. In the introduction there is a brief explanation of the state of art of fuel cell sector, the principal automotive solutions available today, how polarization curve is obtained and the importance of catalyst deposition to improve cell performance. This is followed by an explanation of the COMSOL model used to execute the cell performance simulations with all equations that govern it. After this first explanation, I provide some ionomer ink preparations in the laboratory of Politecnico, analysing how temperature can influence the mixing procedure. Furthermore, using some reference experimental parameters, I changed some of them related to the ionomer section in order to parametrize it and modified it to run the simulations. This process is necessary to evaluate five different membranes and to perform some simulations for them under different temperature and moisture conditions. The reference membrane was Nafion 211 and I compared this one with other Solway membranes. The most performing one is the Solway Aquivion E87 which shows high results compared to the other four typologies. The simulation analysis was conducted by mainly comparing the polarization curves with the main electrical parameters. Considering the full power of the model, I also conducted an analysis of the simulations related to current distribution and oxygen transport. With these simulations I evaluated the results motivating them and comparing them with the results that were available in the literature.