The hazardous effects of pollutants from conventional fuel vehicles have caused the scientific world to move towards environmentally friendly energy sources. Though we have various renewable energy sources, the perfect one to use as an energy source for vehicles is hydrogen.

    A fuel cell is an electrochemical device that can produce electricity by allowing chemical gases (H₂ & O₂) and oxidants as reactants. With anodes and electrolytes, the fuel cell splits the cation and the anion in the reactant to produce electricity.

In this project, a recent development in hydrogen fuel cell engines is reviewed to scrutinize the feasibility of using hydrogen as a major fuel in transportation systems.

    So in this project, we are going to analysis the effect of different bipolar plates material such as Aluminum (Al), Copper (Cu) and Stainless Steel (SS) of a single stack of Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cells.

    Firstly, a three-dimensional (3D) PEM fuel cell model was developed and simulations were conducted using commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) ANSYS FLUENT to examine the effect of each bipolar plate materials on cell performance. Along with cell performance, significant parameters distributions like temperature, pressure, a mass fraction of hydrogen, oxygen and water is presented.

    Finally, polarization curves of three bipolar plates were drawn using the results were compared for validation and the result shows that Al serpentine bipolar plate material performed better than Cu and SS materials.