The objective of this study is to use multi-scale/multi-dimensional model to enhance the development of a fuel cell stack and electrochemical cells with increasing in performance at high current densities. Experimental investigation of oxygen transport has been limited by an inability to resolve water saturation-dependent properties. This work shows the successful in development of a multi-scale calculation technique that incorporates detailed structure of each scale dimension in every component of a fuel cell and simultaneously performed a prediction. The effect of operating conditions under different types of flow-fields, gas diffusion layers, and compression pressures on the transports inside PEMFC will be the primary focus of this work.

Figure 1 gives the idea of multi-scale modeling approach at each component of the fuel cell. The flow-field bipoplar plates and MEA models are calculated using traditional CFD method with exisitng PEMFC model [1-3]. The micro-structure of gas diffusion layer (GDL) and/or microporous layer (MPL) are numerically predicted by Lattice Bolzmann method (LBM) [4-6]. Therfore, during the calcuation, the solutions of each iteration from CFD and LBM are required to simulteneously exchange for the next iteration until all solutions are converged, especially at the interfaces [7]. Figure 2 shows liquid water inside GDL and GDL w/ MPL from the simulation when the macroscopic model is combined with the microscopic model under baseline operation.

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