Effect of Different Shapes and Sizes of Planar Cell on the Performance of Proton Ceramic Fuel Cell: A Preliminary Study Via Computational Fluid Dynamics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56532/mjsat.v6iS1.789Keywords:
Proton ceramic fuel cell, Fuel utilisation efficiency, Power density, CFDAbstract
Proton ceramic fuel cell (PCFC) that operates at intermediate temperature (400 C – 700 C) has been introduced as an alternative to conventional solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC). There are numerous theoretical studies using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) have been done for studying the performance of PCFC. However, the study is limited to only single-channel rectangular PCFC and tubular PCFC with limited literature that covers the effects of cell geometry and size on the performance of PCFC. Thus, this study presents a novel comparative CFD simulation that compare the performance of single channel rectangular PCFC (AR1 = 5 mm x 27 mm and AR2 = 5 mm x 100 mm) and planar button PCFC with two different sizes in diameter which are 13 mm (AB1 = 133mm2) and 25 mm (AB2 = 491 mm2) in terms of fuel utilisation efficiency and power density operating at 700oC under 60% hydrogen fuel . Both models are designed with nearly identical active areas of 135 mm2 and 500 mm2 for a fair performance comparison by using Ansys CFD software. The larger size of single-channel rectangular cell (AR2 = 500 mm2) demonstrates the highest fuel utilisation efficiency of 71.2% while planar button cell (AB2 = 491 mm2) achieve 41.2% efficiency. The highest value of peak power density demonstrates by smaller size of single-channel rectangular cell (AR1 = 135 mm2) with 0.54 W/cm2 at 0.5V compared to the planar button cell (AB1 = 133mm2) that achieve 0.52 W/cm2 at 0.5V. Larger rectangular cells increase fuel utilisation efficiency, while smaller geometries promote higher peak power density, demonstrating a clear geometry-performance trade-off in planar PCFC design.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Haris Iskandar Zeiferi Idzlin, Lidyayatty Abdul Malik, Hamimah Abd Rahman, Chung-Jen Tseng, Nafisah Osman
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