Modeling of fuel cell stacks: Approaches and perspectives
A. Kulikovsky (Research Centre Juelich, Germany)
To achieve high electric power fuel cells are assembled in a stack. Stack consists of repeating modules \cell + bipolar plate". In{plane size of each module is much larger than its thickness; this enables to reduce 3D equations for heat and current transport in a stack to a set of coupled 2D equations. We describe various strategies for parallel stack simulation. In many cases it is sufficient to consider a fragment of a module consisting of a piece of bipolar plate with the single straight channel. Analysis of heat problems for fragments of SOFC and DMFC stacks will be presented.