Numerical Study of Liquid Cooling Plate with Secondary Flow Channels in PEMFC

When the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is working, about half of the chemical energy is converted into heat during electrochemical reactions. In general, fuel cells with a power of more than 5KW require liquid cooling for heat dissipation. In this paper, secondary flow channels are added on the basis of common parallel and serpentine channels, and the maximum surface temperature, average temperature, maximum temperature difference and pressure drop characteristics of the liquid cooling plates corresponding to four flow channels are analyzed by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method at different flow rates. The results show that compared with the traditional parallel channels, the liquid cooling plate with secondary channels can obtain more uniform temperature and pressure distribution, the maximum temperature difference is reduced by 1.61K, and the pressure drop is reduced by about 120Pa. Compared with the traditional serpentine flow channels, although the cooling performance of the liquid cooling plate with secondary flow channels is slightly worse, the pressure drop decreases from 14946Pa to 950Pa, which greatly reduces the pump power consumption. Therefore, adding secondary flow cooling channels provides an excellent solution to the local overheating problem of PEMFC.