Thermal-fluid-structural topology optimization of coolant channels in a proton exchange membrane fuel cell

To improve the cooling performance of coolant channels in a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC), three-dimensional thermal-fluid-structural topology optimization method is proposed. The maximum temperature of the bipolar plates is treated as the objective function. The volume fraction, power dissipation and structural displacement are considered as constraints. The influences of constraints and inlet velocities on the topology optimization performance are investigated. Results show that the initial topology optimal multichannel achieves a 1.92 K maximum temperature reduction and 15.22% cooling performance improvement compared to the traditional straight multichannel. The temperature decreases by 0.5 K and the cooling performance improves by 3.82% and 3.48% when the power dissipation and structural displacement constraints are relaxed by 1.34 and 1.25 times higher than the initial topology optimal configuration, respectively. The maximum temperatures in topology optimal configuration decrease from 354.43 K to 352.76 K and from 339.52 K to 337.19 K when the inlet velocity ranges from 0.05 m/s to 0.3 m/s compared with that of the traditional straight multichannel for uniform and parabolic inlet velocities, of which the cooling performance improves by 7.87–36.59% and 8.12–31.14%, respectively. The above findings have application prospects on designing the coolant channels of PEMFCs.