Future works

As to the future extension, current model will incorporate thermal stress analysis to study the influence of temperature variation in the membrane discussed before. It would also be necessary to develop a transient model to

study the liquid water transport with different flow patterns inside a PEMFC which has a more complicated manipulation. This is because water management, to control the water transport to avoid dehydration and flooding, is another critical issue to improve performance of PEMFC. Therefore, an understanding of flow mechanism of water transport is required for the proper flow pattern design and the optimization of operating conditions and may discover some new phenomena in PEMFC. In addition, it would be interesting to apply current flow patterns to micro PEMFC. Understanding the influences of bend angle and width on performance of micro PEMFC is indispensable for flow pattern development to establish universal heuristics and Peclet number correlations in the design of flow pattern and cell stacks.

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