ABSTRACT: Fuel cells inherently involve phenomena occurring over a wide range of length scales, from the molecular scale on electro-catalyst surfaces through various scales of porous media including catalyst layers, micro-porous layer porous transport layers, to gas supply channels within a cell and finally to the manifolds at the stack scale. In total, length scales spanning about 10 orders of magnitude are of interest to the fuel cell developer. This talk will discuss the various tools developed to represent phenomena occurring from the catalyst scale to the stack scale and methods for coupling information from the various scales. These tools include the ability to model arbitrary porous materials comprising multiple solid phases and to model transport phenomena and electrochemical reactions in these materials
using both virtual porous media and experimentally determined geometries. At the next scale, full cell models are developed and are capable of modelling both beginning of life performance and selected degradation mechanisms. Finally, at the largest scale entire stack simulations are carried out and can be used to explore temperature distributions within a stack as well as stack manifold design. The talk will highlight and present the open source software developed for these analyses and discuss the application of the tools to the design of superior fuel cells.
Bio-sketch: Dr. Jon G Pharoah is Professor of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Queen’s University and former Director of the Queen’s - RMC Fuel Cell Research Centre which he co-founded. He has been working with fuel cells for over 15 years and has expertise in both experimental characterization and theoretical and numerical modelling of fuel cells which is built upon a core expertise in computational fluid dynamics. Dr. Pharoah has spent time at the Norwegian Academy of Science and has authored over 80 peer reviewed publications, predominantly in the area of low and high temperature fuel cell characterization and modelling. These publications are well cited, with an h-factor of 21. Dr. Pharoah is a strong advocate for hydrogen energy systems and to a systems approach to energy.