Effect of Binder and Compression on Pore Structure and Gas Permeability of Gas Diffusion Layer in PEMFC

Abstract

During the production of gas diffusion layer (GDL), hydrophobic binding treatment and assembly compression lead to changes in pore structure and permeability. In this paper, a GDL model based on stochastic reconstruction is developed with binder and inhomogeneous compression. Single-phase flow of gas is simulated by utilizing the Lattice Boltzmann method and the effect of binder and compression on pore structure and permeability of GDL is explored. The results show that both the binder and the compression cause porosity to decrease and small-scale pore volume to increase, leading to the shrink of permeability. The change is basically consistent with the theoretical relationship between porosity and permeability. Moreover, the decrease of permeability caused by compression is higher than that caused by binder when porosity is similar.

Keywords

• gas diffusion layer (gdl)
• binder
• compression
• pore structure
• permeability