Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/733
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Item Analysis of water transport phenomena in thin porous media of a polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2018) Battrell, Logan Robb; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Ryan Anderson; Aubree Trunkle, Erica Eggleton, Lifeng Zhang and Ryan Anderson were co-authors of the article, 'Quantifying cathode water transport via anode humidity measurements in a polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell' in the journal 'Energies' which is contained within this thesis.; Ning Zhu, Lifeng Zhang and Ryan Anderson were co-authors of the article, 'Transient, spatially resolved desaturation of gas diffusion layers measured via synchrotron visualization' in the journal 'International journal of hydrogen energy' which is contained within this thesis.; Virat Patel, Ning Zhu, Lifeng Zhang and Ryan Anderson were co-authors of the article, '4-D imaging of the desaturation of gas diffusion layers by synchrotron radiography' submitted to the journal 'Journal of power sources' which is contained within this thesis.This thesis explores and quantifies water transport related to the desaturation of the thin porous layer known as the Gas Diffusion Layer (GDL) associated with Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) fuel cells. The proper management of water within this layer is critical to optimal fuel cell performance. If there is not enough water, the membrane can become dehydrated, which leads to poor cell performance, but if too much water accumulates or becomes flooded, gas transport is restricted, which also lowers performance and can potentially lead to total cell failure. Understanding the desaturation of this layer is thus key to obtaining and maintaining optimal fuel cell performance. This behavior is explored both at the macroscale, through the quantification of the removal of excess water from an active fuel cell, as well as at the micro-scale, through the use of synchrotron X-ray computed tomography (X-ray CT) to visualize and quantify the desaturation of an initially flooded GDL. The macro-scale investigation extends the previously developed qualitative Anode Water Removal (AWR) test, which functions to identify when poor PEM fuel cell performance is due to excess water, to a diagnostic protocol that quantifies the amount of water being removed by the test through an analysis of the anode pressure drop. Results show that the protocol can be applied to a variety of fuel cell setups and can be used to quickly quantify water management capabilities of novel GDL materials. The microscale investigations show that while both convection and evaporation play a role in the desaturation, evaporation is required to fully desaturate the GDL. Additionally, the microscale investigation allows for the spatial segmentation of the GDL to identify local desaturation rates and temporal saturation profiles, which show that the overall desaturation of the GDL is a heterogeneous process that depends on initial conditions, flow field geometry and the natural anisotropy of the material. Results show that future control strategies and modeling studies will need to expand their investigated domains in order to accurately capture the fully heterogeneous nature of this process.