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D. Kuzdas, D. Murschenhofer, S. Braun, S. Jakubek:
"Quasi-two dimensional fluid dynamical proton exchange membrane fuel cell model solved with spectral methods - part 1";
Talk: 11th European Fluid Mechanics Conference, Sevilla/ES; 2016-09-12 - 2016-09-16.

This work presents the development of a transient quasi-two dimensional (quasi-2D) model for transport phenomena in a polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell. Our main target is to predict the temporal evolution of species concentrations and pressure in a moderate computation time (e.g. for control purposes) regarding the dominant physical effects under reasonable simplifications. The considered domain consists of two parallel supply channels and directly underneath the anode and cathode gas diffusion layers (GDL) with the membrane in between. Gas channels are treated quasi-one-dimensional and connected perpendicular with multiple quasi-one-dimensional GDL-PEM configurations, which in total leads to a quasi-2D composition. The model is current driven and takes into account electroosmotic drag and diffusion for water transport across the PEM and multicomponent diffusion as well as pressure gradients through the GDLs. The supply channels are pressure driven, diffusion is neglected. In all domains except the membrane, the conservation laws of momentum, mass and species are used besides the equation of state for ideal gas mixtures to describe the problem. In the membrane one equation for water transport is utilized only. We consider a three species ideal gas mixture composed of nitrogen and water on both, oxygen and hydrogen on the cathode and anode side, respectively. Water appears gaseous in all domains. Since the nonlinear governing equations are numerically expensive, a linearization with respect to the previous time step is performed.
A Chebyshev spectral collocation method is used for the spatial discretization, time derivatives are consequently approximated by finite differencing schemes with adaptive time steps.