Proton exchange membrane fuel cells are currently considered one of the most promising technologies for clean and efficient electricity generation in the automotive industry. Simulation tools are being frequently used in the development and testing of new or existing fuel cell systems due to the shorter and cheaper process than conventional testing. Computational fluid dynamics simulations in a 3D environment are used in the product development stages, while system simulations are used for testing entire systems, developing control strategies, and optimization. The computational time for system simulations is significantly shorter compared to 3D simulations due to simplifications and assumptions, but this leads to lower accuracy of the result. In this master’s thesis, we improved the electrochemical reduced dimensionality model of the fuel cell, which brought us closer to the response of more accurate 3D simulations and therefore closer to the measurements of actual fuel cells. We incorporated the modelling of losses due to anode kinetics and parasitic reactions into the reduced-dimensionality model, and we also performed a mapping of losses in the catalyst layer from the 3D simulation environment. The accuracy of the modelling and mapping was also evaluated on a more complex case of a fuel cell from the 3D software environment.
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