An investigation of the performance of a water-gas membrane humidifier for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell systems

Reactant gases should be humidified before entering a polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell stack. Humidification of the gases can be performed by a membrane humidifier. In the present study, an analytical model has been proposed to investigate the performance of a water-gas membrane humidifier which is used in the fuel cell systems. At first, a set of nonlinear equations was obtained by applying the mass and energy conservation laws on the gas side of the humidifier. The temperature and the humidity ratio of the outlet gases from the humidifier are the unknowns of these nonlinear equations. The proposed model can evaluate the performance of the humidifier based on the temperature and relative humidity of the outlet gases from the humidifier. The effects of different parameters like: gas flow rate, channel's length and depth, temperature and pressure of the inlet gases on the performance of the humidifier were studied by the developed model. The results show that the channel depth does not have an effect on the temperature and humidity of the humidified outlet gases. In addition, increasing the channel length causes an increase on the dew point of the outlet gases but the relative humidity of the dry inlet gas does not have a noticeable effect on the dew point of the outlet gases. Increasing the temperature of the inlet gases cannot improve the humidifier performance, considerably. The results of the model show that increasing the inlet pressure and using less air flow improve the humidifier performance.