A study on using metal foam as coolant fluid distributor in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell

In this study، detailed fluid flow and heat transfer in cooling plates of polymeric membrane fuel cell is studied using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques. The performances of four different coolant flow field designs were compared in terms of the maximum surface temperature، temperature uniformity and pressure drop characteristics. The results indicate that the porous flow field with metal foaming structure is the best model for reducing surface temperature difference، maximum surface temperature and maximum average temperature among the other models which were studied in this paper. On the other hand، because of high permeable coefficient، coolant fluid pressure drop is rather low in the model (1. 4kPa in comparison with 1. 7kPa and 6. 5kPa at serpentine fields). So the model has the potential to be used as coolant fluid distributor to improve fuel cell performance، of course further optimization is required to improve the design.