Numerical investigation the temperature distribution of PEM fuel cell with the effect of thermal contact resistance

In this paper, a three dimensional non-isothermal PEM fuel cell model with anisotropic gas diffusion layer(GDL) is applied to investigate the effect of the thermal contact resistance(TCR) between flow plate rib and GDL on cell temperature distribution and performance. From the numerical results, it is found that both the maximum cell temperature and the temperature distribution are greatly affected by TCR. When the output cell voltage equals to 0.3 V, the maximum cell temperature with TCR is about 8.5 K larger than that of without TCR. Furthermore, the temperature of GDL changes more smaller in thermal contact resistance cases, however, the temperature distribution of the GDL is behaved more steeper in the cases without thermal contact resistance. Therefore, it is concluded that, to accurately predict the temperature distribution of a PEM fuel cell, the thermal contact resistance between flow plate rib and gas diffusion layer cannot be ignored. © 2015, Science Press. All right reserved.