Further Development of an OpenFOAM LT-PEMFC Toolbox and Its Validation on an Automotive Fuel Cell Design

Over the past two decades, several add-on modules for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software focusing on modelling electrochemical processes and two-phase effects within fuel cells have been described in the literature. Most of these models are based on custom-written code that is not openly accessible to everyone. Furthermore, several commercial CFD codes offer specific modules for modelling fuel cells. Here, code modification is difficult to achieve. This work analyses and further develops the PEMFC toolbox of Kone et al. for use in OpenFOAM to simulate low temperature (LT-)PEM fuel cells. This model is freely available under the GNU GPLv3 licence. The present work focuses on enhanced physical and electrochemical modelling and improved user-friendliness. The major improvements compared to the original toolbox will be detailed in the article, together with the first results obtained. The improved PEMFC toolbox is validated using experimental data from an automotive fuel cell stack design. Furthermore, these results are compared to the original Kone model, and a commercially available CFD model. The improved toolbox reproduces both the experimentally measured polarisation curve and the current density distribution quite accurately, producing results that are fairly comparable to the more sophisticated commercial model.