Flow Distribution Analysis in the SOFC Stack Using CFD Technique

In this paper, a three dimensional solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) model is constructed to investigate the gas distribution and the pressure variation in the external manifold stack by a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach. Several geometric parameters of external manifold stack, including the position of inlet tube, depth of the manifold and the channel resistance are optimized to achieve uniform gas distributions among the channels. Simulation results indicate that a gas distributor can enhance the flow uniformity effectively. Besides, with the increasing depth of the manifold, the flow tends to be more uniform in T-manifold but has a small impact on C-manifold stack. It is also shown that flow distribution is intensively enhanced with the raise of resistance, especially from 0Pa to 100Pa. Modeling results highlight the importance of manifold and channel structure design for external manifold stack and can be widely applied to design the geometric parameters.