A Simulation Study on Magnetic Field Distribution of Two-Cells Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell Stack

As the promising device in automotive, stationary, and portable applications, proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC)’s performance has attracted growing attention, which can be strongly affected by its current distribution. With the characteristic of online and nondestruction, magnetic field can be used to evaluate the current distribution and PEMFC state, while further study is still lacked for understanding the effect of PEMFC stack structure and operation conditions on its magnetic field distribution. In this study, a numerical model of two-cells PEMFC stack is established to investigate its magnetic field distributions at different current densities and states, from which the coupling effect of magnetic field of each cell is clarified. In this PEMFC stack model, the distributions of magnetic field at different states and current densities are constant while the magnitude of magnetic field will vary. Moreover, coupling effect will be weakened with the cell distance between two cells. From the results, these findings can be utilized to monitor the operation state of PEMFC stack in the further researches.