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Plant vs. Animal Prototype for Designing Bio-inspired PEMFC Flow Fields: Corn Veins or Murray’s Law?

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Abstract

Designing bio-inspired flow fields holds great potential in improving the performance of Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC). Two kinds of biological prototypes are widely used: plant prototype and animal prototype. It remains a question which one of these prototypes is more appropriate for the scenario of PEMFC. Here, a comparative study was conducted to compare bionic flow fields based on animal and plant prototypes. First, a Corn Leaf Vein Mathematical Model (CLMM) was established by extracting structural parameters from corn leaves of two growth stages. Then the obtained CLMM and well-known Murray’s law were employed to design bionic flow fields corresponding to the plant and animal prototypes, respectively, which have been subsequently compared by numerical investigations. The results demonstrate that the flow field guided by Murray’s law outperforms the counterpart based on the structural parameters of CLMM in terms of PEMFC net output power, mass transport, water management and pressure drop, suggesting that animal circulation system is more suitable to the bionic flow field design of PEMFC than plant leaf veins. The work may also offer valuable insights into the design of other flow fields related to electrochemical energy conversion.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank www.51yuansu.com for the human body image and the corn image in Fig. 4. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51975245 and 52075214), Jilin Provincial Science & Technology Department (20200201058JC and 20190303039SF), Key Science and Technology R&D Projects of Jilin Province (2020C023-3), Program of Jilin University Science and Technology Innovative Research Team (2020TD-03), Youth Development Program of Jilin University (2020-JCXK-22), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

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  1. Key Laboratory of Bionic Engineering (Ministry of Education), College of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, Jilin University, Changchun, 130022, China

    Wenxuan Fan, Taotao Zhao, Ke Jiang, Lei Sun, Saisai Jia, Qianqian Wu, Guolong Lu & Zhenning Liu

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  1. Wenxuan Fan
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  2. Taotao Zhao
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Fan, W., Zhao, T., Jiang, K. et al. Plant vs. Animal Prototype for Designing Bio-inspired PEMFC Flow Fields: Corn Veins or Murray’s Law?. J Bionic Eng 19, 761–776 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42235-022-00174-4

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