Mehdi Mortazavi
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Multiscale Thermal Fluids Laboratory, Western New England University, Springfield, MA, 01119, USA
Seyed A. Niknam
Western New England University, Springfield, MA, 01119, USA
In this paper, the liquid-gas two-phase flow pressure drop signatures are analyzed for minichannels. The twophase
flow pressure drops are measured in a 2mm×1mm flow channel supplied with air and liquid water. The
ranges of air and water flow rates represent operating conditions of proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel
cells. As a PEM fuel cell operates, chemical energy is converted into electrical energy with water and heat
as byproducts. The produced water can pass through the gas diffusion layer (GDL), a porous layer in PEM
fuel cell, and emerges on its surface within the flow channel. This causes liquid-gas two-phase flow in flow
channels. In this study, liquid-gas two-phase flow pressure drops are measured in an ex-situ PEM fuel cell
test section. The experimentally measure pressure drops are compared with three models of two-phase flow
pressure drop. Comparing 108 experimentally measured pressure drop data points with models proposed by
Saisorn and Wongwises [29], English and Kandlikar [24], and Mishima and Hibiki [28] revealed that the latter showed the best prediction capability with a mean absolute percentage error as low as 10%. Moreover,
in this study the distribution of pressure signatures are plotted and analyzed.