Abstract
This thesis presents the design of polymer electrolyte fuel cell model that can be used to analyze data obtained from fuel cell lab experiments. The model focuses on finding fuel cell most significant coefficients that affect the system’s performance at maximum power densities. The coefficient values include theoretical open circuit voltage, exchange current densities, charge transfer coefficients, ohmic resistance, and limiting current densities. This study focuses on individual coefficients to determine the effects of operating conditions, material, and fabrication methods have on the performance of fuel cell. In addition to optimizing operating conditions by mitigating the largest loss between activation, ohmic, and concentration overpotentials, the fuel cell lab can use the model to investigate which coefficients are affected by the changes in the system. Matlab is used to calculate the theoretical open circuit voltages, while Engineering Equation Solver is used to validate the chemical equation’s energy balance. Microsoft Excel uses the data from experiments to calculate the coefficients of a given experiment set up. By comparing the maximum power densities between experiment and the model, the highest percentage error is less than 8%. The study can be used to further understand the effect of charge transfer coefficients and exchange current densities rather than assuming constant values on specific fuel cell set up.