IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/appene/v359y2024ics0306261924000758.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Investigating the transient electrical behaviors in PEM fuel cells under various platinum distributions within cathode catalyst layers

Author

Listed:
  • Fan, Ruijia
  • Chang, Guofeng
  • Xu, Yiming
  • Zhang, Yuanzhi

Abstract

The spatial distribution of platinum (Pt) within the cathode catalyst layer (CCL) is vital for the electrochemical reactions and mass transport in fuel cells. Though important, the transient effects of these distributions are seldom explored. This study examines the impact of Pt distribution on transient electrical behaviors, including voltage and local current distribution (LCD) uniformity, using a transient, two-dimensional, two-phase, non-isothermal fuel cell model that incorporates catalyst agglomerate. Three Pt distribution types are investigated: uniform, MPL-side biased, and PEM-side biased. Results indicate a voltage undershoot occurs during current loading. Compared to the homogeneous CCL, PEM-side bias reduces this undershoot by 12.5% due to shortened proton transfer paths and decreased ohmic loss, while MPL-side bias increases it by 18.8% due to the inverse effect. Additionally, Pt distribution affects both oxygen transport and reaction resistance within the agglomerate, influencing LCD uniformity. Under loading conditions, gradient CCLs show inferior LCD uniformity than homogeneous ones. Peak non-uniformity values of 0.22, 0.59, and 0.71 are observed for homogeneous, MPL-biased, and PEM-biased CCLs, respectively. From the perspective of voltage and LCD uniformity, the MPL-side biased CCL is not found to enhance dynamic characteristics, whereas the PEM-side bias improves voltage undershoot but at the cost of LCD uniformity. This study provides a novel perspective on fuel cell dynamics, emphasizing the transient effects of Pt distribution and their potential for optimizing dynamic performance by adjusting the Pt gradient.

Suggested Citation

  • Fan, Ruijia & Chang, Guofeng & Xu, Yiming & Zhang, Yuanzhi, 2024. "Investigating the transient electrical behaviors in PEM fuel cells under various platinum distributions within cathode catalyst layers," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 359(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:appene:v:359:y:2024:i:c:s0306261924000758
    DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2024.122692
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261924000758
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.apenergy.2024.122692?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gong, Chengyuan & Xing, Lu & Liang, Cong & Tu, Zhengkai, 2022. "Modeling and dynamic characteristic simulation of air-cooled proton exchange membrane fuel cell stack for unmanned aerial vehicle," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 188(C), pages 1094-1104.
    2. Roshandel, Ramin & Ahmadi, Farzad, 2013. "Effects of catalyst loading gradient in catalyst layers on performance of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 921-931.
    3. Jia, Fei & Tian, Xiaodi & Liu, Fengfeng & Ye, Junjie & Yang, Chengpeng, 2023. "Oxidant starvation under various operating conditions on local and transient performance of proton exchange membrane fuel cells," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 331(C).
    4. Kim, Bosung & Cha, Dowon & Kim, Yongchan, 2015. "The effects of air stoichiometry and air excess ratio on the transient response of a PEMFC under load change conditions," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 143-149.
    5. Abdin, Z. & Webb, C.J. & Gray, E.MacA., 2016. "PEM fuel cell model and simulation in Matlab–Simulink based on physical parameters," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 116(P1), pages 1131-1144.
    6. Wang, Qianqian & Tang, Fumin & Li, Bing & Dai, Haifeng & Zheng, Jim P. & Zhang, Cunman & Ming, Pingwen, 2022. "Investigation of the thermal responses under gas channel and land inside proton exchange membrane fuel cell with assembly pressure," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 308(C).
    7. He, Pu & Mu, Yu-Tong & Park, Jae Wan & Tao, Wen-Quan, 2020. "Modeling of the effects of cathode catalyst layer design parameters on performance of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 277(C).
    8. Chen, Huicui & Zhang, Ruirui & Xia, Zhifeng & Weng, Qianyao & Zhang, Tong & Pei, Pucheng, 2023. "Experimental investigation on PEM fuel cell flooding mitigation under heavy loading condition," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 349(C).
    9. Cho, Junhyun & Park, Jaeman & Oh, Hwanyeong & Min, Kyoungdoug & Lee, Eunsook & Jyoung, Jy-Young, 2013. "Analysis of the transient response and durability characteristics of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell with different micro-porous layer penetration thicknesses," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 111(C), pages 300-309.
    10. Oh, Hwanyeong & Park, Jaeman & Min, Kyoungdoug & Lee, Eunsook & Jyoung, Jy-Young, 2015. "Effects of pore size gradient in the substrate of a gas diffusion layer on the performance of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 149(C), pages 186-193.
    11. Zeng, Tao & Xiao, Long & Chen, Jinrui & Li, Yu & Yang, Yi & Huang, Shulong & Deng, Chenghao & Zhang, Caizhi, 2023. "Feedforward-based decoupling control of air supply for vehicular fuel cell system: Methodology and experimental validation," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 335(C).
    12. Pei, Pucheng & Chen, Huicui, 2014. "Main factors affecting the lifetime of Proton Exchange Membrane fuel cells in vehicle applications: A review," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 60-75.
    13. Gurong Shen & Jing Liu & Hao Bin Wu & Pengcheng Xu & Fang Liu & Chasen Tongsh & Kui Jiao & Jinlai Li & Meilin Liu & Mei Cai & John P. Lemmon & Grigorii Soloveichik & Hexing Li & Jian Zhu & Yunfeng Lu, 2020. "Multi-functional anodes boost the transient power and durability of proton exchange membrane fuel cells," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 11(1), pages 1-10, December.
    14. Ren, Peng & Meng, Yining & Pei, Pucheng & Fu, Xi & Chen, Dongfang & Li, Yuehua & Zhu, Zijing & Zhang, Lu & Wang, Mingkai, 2023. "Rapid synchronous state-of-health diagnosis of membrane electrode assemblies in fuel cell stacks," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 330(PA).
    15. Garcia-Sanchez, D. & Morawietz, T. & da Rocha, P. Gama & Hiesgen, R. & Gazdzicki, P. & Friedrich, K.A., 2020. "Local impact of load cycling on degradation in polymer electrolyte fuel cells," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 259(C).
    16. Xing, Lei & Das, Prodip K. & Song, Xueguan & Mamlouk, Mohamed & Scott, Keith, 2015. "Numerical analysis of the optimum membrane/ionomer water content of PEMFCs: The interaction of Nafion® ionomer content and cathode relative humidity," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 242-257.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Wei, Pengnan & Chang, Guofeng & Fan, Ruijia & Xu, Yiming & Chen, Siqi, 2023. "Investigation of output performance and temperature distribution uniformity of PEMFC based on Pt loading gradient design," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 352(C).
    2. Zhang, Qian & Schulze, Mathias & Gazdzicki, Pawel & Friedrich, K. Andreas, 2021. "Comparison of different performance recovery procedures for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 302(C).
    3. Wang, Yang & Luo, Hui & Li, Guang & Jiang, Jianming, 2016. "Highly active platinum electrocatalyst towards oxygen reduction reaction in renewable energy generations of proton exchange membrane fuel cells," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 173(C), pages 59-66.
    4. Deng, Hao & Wang, Dawei & Wang, Renfang & Xie, Xu & Yin, Yan & Du, Qing & Jiao, Kui, 2016. "Effect of electrode design and operating condition on performance of hydrogen alkaline membrane fuel cell," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 183(C), pages 1272-1278.
    5. Zhang, Xiaoqing & Yang, Jiapei & Ma, Xiao & Zhuge, Weilin & Shuai, Shijin, 2022. "Modelling and analysis on effects of penetration of microporous layer into gas diffusion layer in PEM fuel cells: Focusing on mass transport," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 254(PA).
    6. Saeidfar, Asal & Yesilyurt, Serhat, 2023. "Numerical investigation of the effects of catalyst layer composition and channel to rib width ratios for low platinum loaded PEMFCs," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 339(C).
    7. Wang, Qianqian & Tang, Fumin & Li, Bing & Dai, Haifeng & Zheng, Jim P. & Zhang, Cunman & Ming, Pingwen, 2022. "Investigation of the thermal responses under gas channel and land inside proton exchange membrane fuel cell with assembly pressure," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 308(C).
    8. Zhao, Jian & Ozden, Adnan & Shahgaldi, Samaneh & Alaefour, Ibrahim E. & Li, Xianguo & Hamdullahpur, Feridun, 2018. "Effect of Pt loading and catalyst type on the pore structure of porous electrodes in polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 150(C), pages 69-76.
    9. Akira Nishimura & Kyohei Toyoda & Yuya Kojima & Syogo Ito & Eric Hu, 2021. "Numerical Simulation on Impacts of Thickness of Nafion Series Membranes and Relative Humidity on PEMFC Operated at 363 K and 373 K," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(24), pages 1-24, December.
    10. Dong Zhu & Yanbo Yang & Tiancai Ma, 2022. "Evaluation the Resistance Growth of Aged Vehicular Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell Stack by Distribution of Relaxation Times," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(9), pages 1-19, May.
    11. Oh, Hwanyeong & Park, Jaeman & Min, Kyoungdoug & Lee, Eunsook & Jyoung, Jy-Young, 2015. "Effects of pore size gradient in the substrate of a gas diffusion layer on the performance of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 149(C), pages 186-193.
    12. Wu, Horng-Wen, 2016. "A review of recent development: Transport and performance modeling of PEM fuel cells," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 165(C), pages 81-106.
    13. Zuo, Jian & Lv, Hong & Zhou, Daming & Xue, Qiong & Jin, Liming & Zhou, Wei & Yang, Daijun & Zhang, Cunman, 2021. "Deep learning based prognostic framework towards proton exchange membrane fuel cell for automotive application," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 281(C).
    14. Zeng, Tao & Zhang, Caizhi & Hao, Dong & Cao, Dongpu & Chen, Jiawei & Chen, Jinrui & Li, Jin, 2020. "Data-driven approach for short-term power demand prediction of fuel cell hybrid vehicles," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 208(C).
    15. Yuan, Hao & Dai, Haifeng & Ming, Pingwen & Li, Sida & Wei, Xuezhe, 2022. "A new insight into the effects of agglomerate parameters on internal dynamics of proton exchange membrane fuel cell by an advanced impedance dimension model," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 253(C).
    16. Lin, Rui & Diao, Xiaoyu & Ma, Tiancai & Tang, Shenghao & Chen, Liang & Liu, Dengcheng, 2019. "Optimized microporous layer for improving polymer exchange membrane fuel cell performance using orthogonal test design," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 254(C).
    17. Yuan, Hao & Dai, Haifeng & Wei, Xuezhe & Ming, Pingwen, 2020. "A novel model-based internal state observer of a fuel cell system for electric vehicles using improved Kalman filter approach," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 268(C).
    18. Zeng, Tao & Xiao, Long & Chen, Jinrui & Li, Yu & Yang, Yi & Huang, Shulong & Deng, Chenghao & Zhang, Caizhi, 2023. "Feedforward-based decoupling control of air supply for vehicular fuel cell system: Methodology and experimental validation," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 335(C).
    19. Wu, Ziyao & Pei, Pucheng & Xu, Huachi & Jia, Xiaoning & Ren, Peng & Wang, Bozheng, 2019. "Study on the effect of membrane electrode assembly parameters on polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell performance by galvanostatic charging method," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 251(C), pages 1-1.
    20. Fan, Ruijia & Chang, Guofeng & Xu, Yiming & Xu, Jiamin, 2023. "Multi-objective optimization of graded catalyst layer to improve performance and current density uniformity of a PEMFC," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 262(PB).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:appene:v:359:y:2024:i:c:s0306261924000758. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.