openFuelCell2: A new computational tool for fuel cells, electrolyzers, and other electrochemical devices and processes

Fuel cells/electrolyzers are efficient and clean electrochemical devices that convert chemical energy directly into electricity and vice versa. They have attracted sustainable attention over the past decade from multiple experimental and numerical studies. However, detailed experimental investigations are typically expensive and challenging for providing a number of operating conditions and designs. Computational analysis offers an alternative approach for these studies. With the steadily increasing high-performance computing resources available, the limitations of numerical simulations have substantially decreased. This contribution details the design choice and code structure of modern electrochemical devices, which have been implemented as a versatile C++ library named openFuelCell2 within the open-source platform OpenFOAM, allowing for large-scale parallel calculations to be performed. The solver considers the major transport phenomena in a typical electrochemical device, including fluid flow, heat and mass transfer, species and charge transfer, and electrochemical reaction. This enables numerical simulations on popular electrochemical devices, such as fuel cells and electrolyzers, to be conducted. The paper also describes the domain decomposition, and parallel performance issues, as well as future applications.