Abstract
With the increase of electric vehicle use and production, and a push towards carbon neutral energy options in power plants, fuel cells are being utilized more than ever as an alternative to fossil fuel energy generation. A fuel cell is electrochemical device that converts fuel in the form of chemical energy to electricity. Chemical energy can come in the form of hydrogen gas, or other chemical elements, depending on the type of fuel cell. Fuel cells are consistently studied and adjusted to reach optimum energy output. Fuel flow rate, pressure, temperature, and flow-channel size are a few among many aspects that all need to be considered during the design process. With the help of neutron imaging, it has become increasingly easier to visually see and study the flow in the bipolar plate (BP) of the fuel cell and trace the buildup of water from within. During normal operation it is common for there to be water buildup in the flow channel, causing a blockage. The purpose of this report is to create a textured flow field design for a fuel cell flow channel that limits water buildup. Multiple textured flow field surfaces were considered and ultimately five have been chosen to be manufactured and tested in this study. The five textures that are used in experiment for this study are a honeycomb hexagon cut outs design (HEX), circular cut outs (CIR), randomized extruded structure (RND), v groove channel (VG), and a control group straight pipe tube (CTL). Many data analysis approaches were completed, comparing data as a whole and cross comparing between specific experiments. MATLAB code was devised to count water pixel change across images and output data plots accordingly. Start and finish water pixel counts per tube and maximum and minimum pixel counts per tube were notated for each experiment. Ultimately, trends show the VG tube, and the HEX tube similarly trapped and held onto the most water. The RND tube and the CIR tube had the least amount of water volume accumulation. The CTL tube ranked in the middle. These results imply that with the addition of rounded surface structure patterns onto parts, it could aid in water wicking.