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Download fileA comparison of evaporative and liquid cooling methods for fuel cell vehicles
Despite having efficiencies higher than internal combustion engines, heat rejection from fuel cells remains challenging due to lower operating temperatures and reduced exhaust heat flow. This work details a full system simulation which is then used to compare a conventional liquid cooled fuel cell system to two types of evaporatively cooled fuel cell systems. Both steady state and transient operation are considered. Results show the radiator frontal area required to achieve thermal and water balance for an evaporatively cooled system with an aluminium condensing radiator is 27% less than a conventional liquid cooled system at 1.25 A/cm2 steady state operation. The primary reason for the reduction is higher heat transfer coefficients in the condensing radiator due to phase change. It is also shown that the liquid water separation efficiency has a significant influence on the required radiator frontal area of the evaporatively cooled system.
Funding
This work has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant number EP/ G037116/1.
History
School
- Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Department
- Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering
Published in
International Journal of Hydrogen EnergyVolume
41Issue
32Pages
14217 - 14229Citation
FLY, A. and THRING, R.H., 2016. A comparison of evaporative and liquid cooling methods for fuel cell vehicles. International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, 41 (32), pp. 14217-14229.Publisher
© The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC.Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2016-06-07Publication date
2016-06-28Notes
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)ISSN
0360-3199Publisher version
Language
- en