Recent advances in the openFuelCell project

The openFuelCell project was originally directed towards performance calculations for high temperature solid oxide fuel cells. The basic algorithm involves a solution for the Nernst equation , one or two Butler-Volmer equation(s) for the overpotentials, and the Kirchhoff-Ohm law for the local current density. This paper describes methods used to improve the stability of the original solver at both low and high current densities, and then provides a description of more recent calculations performed on polymer electrolyte fuel cells, with mesh sizes of 32 million cells using 900 cores. The results are validated with experimental data and verified with analytical solutions.