The effect of pulsating pressure on the performance of a PEM fuel cell with a wavy cathode surface

The paper by Hamid Reza Ashorynejad,  Koroush Javaherdeh and Harry Van den Akker on ‘The effect of pulsating pressure on the performance of a PEM fuel cell with a wavy cathode surface’ is part of the PhD thesis of the 1^st author defended at the University of Guilan in Iran, but was carried out at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, under the guidance of the 3^rd author. The paper presents the results of numerical simulations by means of a multi-component lattice Boltzmann method that resolves the single-phase flow through the porous gas diffusion layer of a PEM fuel cell. The cathode channel has a wavy form, while the air flows under the action of a pulsating pressure. The chemical reaction at the cathode’s catalyst surface is described in lattice Boltzmann terms by means of the halfway bounce-back boundary condition proposed by Kamali et al. from the same Delft group for a chemical reaction  in the absence of convection: see http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cej.2012.07.019 .  Pulsating the air flow was found to have a positive effect on fuel cell performance. The paper demonstrates the power of the lattice Boltzmann technique for simulating a complex process like that in a PEM fuel cell involving time-dependent flow, species diffusion, and a chemical reaction.