Transporte masa: Simulación de fluidos incomprensibles en una capa difusora de gas utilizando OpenFoam

Abstract

The Gas Diffusion Layer (GDL) provides a transport route for the reactant species from the flow channels to the catalytic layer in a fuel cell. The components design requires that the species present a uniform diffusion towards the electrodes and that the formed products are shifted as faster as possible, to avoid the increase of the ohmic resistance due to the blocking of the active sites, or it constitutes a bottleneck that the performance decrease fast. This work presents a solution proposal for the continuity equation in incomprenssible fluids in a 3D model of a gas diffuser layer with titanium wired mesh characteristics of a fuel cell using "OpenFOAM" open source software. The aim of the study is to show that under different scales or size of the gas diffusion layer there are significant changes in the velocities of propagation of the reactant species towards the active area of the fuel cell.