An open implementation of a two-phase PEMFC model in MATLAB

Vetter, Roman; Schumacher, Jürgen

Publication type:	Conference other
Type of review:	Peer review (abstract)
Title:	An open implementation of a two-phase PEMFC model in MATLAB
Authors:	Vetter, Roman Schumacher, Jürgen
Conference details:	15th Symposium on Modeling and Experimental Validation of Electrochemical Energy Devices (ModVal 2018), Aarau, Switzerland, 12-13 April 2018
Issue Date:	12-Apr-2018
Publisher / Ed. Institution:	Electrochemistry Laboratory, Paul Scherrer Institut PSI
Language:	English
Subjects:	Proton exchange; Membrane; Fuel cell
Subject (DDC):	621.04: Energy engineering
Abstract:	In almost three decades of PEM fuel cell modelling, a large number of numerical models has been developed both in science and industry, but almost none have been made publically available. There is a large need for standardization and establishing a common ground in the development of PEMFC simulation codes, to prevent each research group from having to start from scratch. To this day, there are only two known open-source codes capable of simulating the state of the art in PEMFC modeling at the cell scale: OpenFCST [1], a highly capable but heavy FEM package consisting of more than 120.000 lines of C++ code published under the MIT license, and FAST-FC [2], a finite volume tool built on top of OpenFOAM, consisting of about 12.000 lines of code (not counting the required OpenFOAM) published under the GNU GPL v3, which can pose an insurmountable legal barrier for commercial use. Here, we present the first open standalone implementation of a full-blown, steady-state, non-isothermal two-phase, macro-homogeneous MEA model for low-temperature PEMFCs [3]. It implements the most dominant through-plane transport processes in a 5-layer MEA (Fig. 1): the transport of charge, energy, gas species and water. This results in eight coupled nonlinear second-order partial differential equations, which are numerically solved together. The focus is on code simplicity, compactness, portability, transparency, accessibility and free availability. The model is implemented as a standalone MATLAB function, based on MATLAB's boundary value problem solver, and released to the public under a BSD-like license, permitting unrestricted use for commercial and non-commercial purposes. In order to establish a new reference for model comparison, validation and benchmarking, we subject our model to a series of stress tests with operating conditions recommended for automotive applications by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission [4] and report here on the test results. Acknowledgements: Financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation under the National Research Programme "Energy Turnaround (NRP 70)", project no. 153790, grant no. 407040_153790, from the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation under contract no. KTI.2014.0115, through the Swiss Competence Center for Energy Research (SCCER Mobility), and from the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE), is gratefully acknowledged. References: 1. M. Secanell et al.. ECS Transactions 64, 2014, 655–680 2. D. B. Harvey, J. G. Pharoah, and K. Karan. https://www.fastsimulations.com/ 3. R. Vetter, J. O. Schumacher, manuscript submitted to Computer Physics Communications 4. G. Tsotridis, A. Pilenga, G. De Marco, T. Malkow, JRC Science for Policy report, EUR 27632 EN, 2015
URI:	https://digitalcollection.zhaw.ch/handle/11475/5945
Fulltext version:	Published version
License (according to publishing contract):	Licence according to publishing contract
Departement:	School of Engineering
Organisational Unit:	Institute of Computational Physics (ICP)
Appears in collections:	Publikationen School of Engineering

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Vetter, R., & Schumacher, J. (2018, April 12). An open implementation of a two-phase PEMFC model in MATLAB. 15th Symposium on Modeling and Experimental Validation of Electrochemical Energy Devices (ModVal 2018), Aarau, Switzerland, 12-13 April 2018.

Vetter, R. and Schumacher, J. (2018) ‘An open implementation of a two-phase PEMFC model in MATLAB’, in 15th Symposium on Modeling and Experimental Validation of Electrochemical Energy Devices (ModVal 2018), Aarau, Switzerland, 12-13 April 2018. Electrochemistry Laboratory, Paul Scherrer Institut PSI.

R. Vetter and J. Schumacher, “An open implementation of a two-phase PEMFC model in MATLAB,” in 15th Symposium on Modeling and Experimental Validation of Electrochemical Energy Devices (ModVal 2018), Aarau, Switzerland, 12-13 April 2018, Apr. 2018.

VETTER, Roman und Jürgen SCHUMACHER, 2018. An open implementation of a two-phase PEMFC model in MATLAB. In: 15th Symposium on Modeling and Experimental Validation of Electrochemical Energy Devices (ModVal 2018), Aarau, Switzerland, 12-13 April 2018. Conference presentation. Electrochemistry Laboratory, Paul Scherrer Institut PSI. 12 April 2018

Vetter, Roman, and Jürgen Schumacher. 2018. “An Open Implementation of a Two-Phase PEMFC Model in MATLAB.” Conference presentation. In 15th Symposium on Modeling and Experimental Validation of Electrochemical Energy Devices (ModVal 2018), Aarau, Switzerland, 12-13 April 2018. Electrochemistry Laboratory, Paul Scherrer Institut PSI.

Vetter, Roman, and Jürgen Schumacher. “An Open Implementation of a Two-Phase PEMFC Model in MATLAB.” 15th Symposium on Modeling and Experimental Validation of Electrochemical Energy Devices (ModVal 2018), Aarau, Switzerland, 12-13 April 2018, Electrochemistry Laboratory, Paul Scherrer Institut PSI, 2018.