A simple tanks-in-series model is presented, which allows for the understanding of the basic physics behind complex spatiotemporal behaviors observed in self-humidified polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells. Our approach is focused on how the intrinsically nonlinear dynamics of water formation couples with water transport, leading to multistability, inhomogeneous steady state current pr...

In this study cross section geometry and material of gasket in proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells have been investigated to achieve optimized fuel cell in terms of energy efficiency. The role of gaskets in fuel cells is sealing of gas flow channels and preventing from combination of them. In a PEM stack, gasket with approved geometry that suffers more stress has better sealing. For this ...

The performance of polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell is mainly influenced by ohmic, activation, and concentration overpotentials. Ohmic overpotential is directly proportional to electric resistance in the fuel cell components that can be estimated from the experimental data or from the empirical relation for the cell polarization curve. However, such simple relation is not available ...

In this paper, we introduce a modified interpretation of the water activity presented in Springer et al. [T.E. Springer, T.A. Zawodzinski, S. ottesfeld, Polymer electrolyte fuel cell model, J. Electrochem. Soc. 138 (8) (1991) 2334–2342]. The modification directly affects the membrane ater transport between the anode and the cathode (two electrodes) of the polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel...

The PEM fuel cell model presented in this paper is based on modelling species transport and coupling electrochemical reactions to species transport in an innovative way. Species transport is modelled by obtaining a 2D analytic solution for species concentration distribution in the plane perpendicular to the gas-flow and coupling consecutive 2D solutions by means of a 1D numerical gas-flow model...

The aim of this paper is the evaluation of the performance of a low pressure PEM (proton exchange membrane) fuel cell stack to step load changes, which are characteristic of standalone fuel cell system applications. The goal is a better understanding of the electrical behavior of the FC (fuel cell), as a result of the electrochemical processes, via the cell’s voltage characteristic during trans...

In this paper, a solution for the oxygen stoichiometry control problem for Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cells is presented. The solution relies on the use of a reference model, where the resulting nonlinear error model is brought to a Takagi-Sugeno (TS) form using the non-linear sector approach. The TS model is suitable for designing a controller using Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI)-ba...

Batteries in a fuel-cell power system are essential to providing the additional power during the sharp load-transients. This necessitates a power-electronics subsystem (PES), which controls the energy flow between the fuel-cell stack, the battery, and the application load during the transient and in the steady states. In this paper, a distributed PES (comprising a multimodule dc-dc boost conver...