Comparison of a Multi-Dimensional Model With a Reduced Order Pseudo Three-Dimensional Model for Simulation of Solid Oxide Fuel Cells

Numerical modeling has helped the SOFC research for over a decade in which period the models grew in complexity and detail. Multi-dimensional detailed models such as FLUENT’s SOFC module calculate three dimensional distributions of velocity, temperature, concentration and electric potential inside all components of the fuel cell. Such models while being very helpful in understanding the processes inside the fuel cell may prove to be very expensive for transient simulations and simulations of multi-cell stacks. Hence reduced order modeling is still used for such applications. However, reduced order modeling entails reduction of detail and consequent loss in accuracy. In this paper a multi-dimensional SOFC code, FLUENT’s SOFC module, is compared with a reduced order pseudo three-dimensional model, DREAM SOFC. FLUENT’s SOFC module is a commercial solver built on the popular CFD solver FLUENT. DREAM SOFC is an in house code developed at Computational Fluid Dynamics and Applied Multi Physics (CFD&AMP) Center at West Virginia University. It is a combination of a one dimensional model for channels and three-dimensional models for the rest of the components in a SOFC. This approach avoids having to solve Navier-Stokes equations inside channels but still retains the three-dimensionality inside important components. Same test cases with similar conditions are simulated with these codes and results are compared with each other.