UC Irvine

In the last few years, a rapid development in the method known as the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) has been achieved. It demonstrated its ability to simulate hydrodynamic systems, multiphase and multicomponent fluids. The main advantages of the LBM are the parallelism of the method, the simplicity of programming and the capability of incorporating model interactions. The use of the LBM to understand the flow structure inside the Gas Diffusion Layer (GDL) of a fuel cell is a particular active topic, motivated by the need of finding alternative energy conversion devices.

In the present work we developed a rigorous initial base of a flow solver based on the LBM, the BGK model is used to approximate the collision term in the Boltzmann equation. We used the bounce back scheme to simulate the boundary conditions and the flow solver is validated against three benchmarking cases. The process of applying the boundary conditions was automated to handle complicated flow structures. We simulated the flow in a 2D structure surface extracted from a 3D reconstructed GDL, using both non-parallel and parallel code. The results for a single phase flow show the flow structure expected, the convergence of the parallel code is faster and its parallelism is easier comparing to the traditional Navier-Stokes solver.