Adiabatic relaxation of convective-diffusive gas transport in a porous fuel cell electrode (Q2783706)

A model is formulated for flows of a multicomponent mixture of ideal gases in a highly porous electrode which acts to distribute reactant gases uniformly to the active catalyst sites. The model is comprised of a porous medium equation for the evolution of the gas mixture and a singularly perturbed convection-diffusion equation for the interspecies mass transfer within the mixture. The equations are coupled through nonlinear boundary conditions which describe consuption of reactants and generation of end products at the catalyst layer. Through a two-time-scale analysis, a single reduced equation is derived which captures the slow, diffusively driven, adiabatic relaxation to the steady state at each electrode. The asymptotic results are compared with one- and two-dimensional computations of the full system.