A Novel Flow Design on the Planar Printed-Circuit-Board DMFC Modules

A direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) fabricated using the printed circuit board fabrication process places multiple cells in planar arrangement and forms a PCB DMFC module. Properly transporting the methanol solution into the cells and maintaining continual DMFC operation are very important. This paper presents a strategy for producing anode flow channel designs on planar DMFC modules. The flow designs are accomplished using computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations. The proposed strategy was successfully applied to produce flow designs on several DMFC modules.