Reduced-Order Electrochemical Model for Coupled Three-Dimensional Flow Simulations of High-Temperature Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cells

Abstract Accurate modeling of multiphysics systems presents significant computational challenges, particularly when addressing coupled transport phenomena across interfaces of multidomain systems with geometric complexities as in high-temperature polymer electrolyte membrane (HT-PEM) fuel cells. Developing a comprehensive simulation framework that captures the geometric, physical, and electrochemical characteristics of such devices is inherently complex. In the present work, we employ a one-dimensional electrochemical model to explore the dynamics of transport and reaction kinetics in the membrane-electrode assembly. On the basis of this, we propose a decoupled approach for the solution of the flow and electrochemical phenomena in a fuel cell in which the anode-side and cathode-side hydrodynamics are evaluated individually through separate computational fluid dynamics simulations and are together coupled to a reduced-order model to account for electrochemical effects. The governing equations across all regions are solved independently, sequentially, and iteratively, until global convergence is achieved. The effectiveness of this simulation framework has been validated, and its computational efficiency demonstrated by comparison with the fully coupled solution. When applying it to simulate several flow scenarios of HT-PEM fuel cells, it is shown that the proposed methodology enables robust, scalable, efficient, and accurate simulations of arbitrarily complex electrochemical systems.