Numerical study of characteristic of heat and mass transfer in planar membrane humidifier according to flow direction

The humidifying supply gas is important in terms of the performance efficiency and membrane life improvement of a PEM fuel cell. A planar membrane humidifier is classified as a cross-flow and counter-flow type depending on the flow direction, and heat and mass transfer occur between the plate and the membrane. In this study, the changes in heat and mass transfer for various inlet temperatures and flow rates are compared according to the flow direction by using the sensible and latent ε-NTU method. The obtained results indicate that the counter flow shows higher heat and mass transfer performance than the cross flow at a low flow rate, and the difference in performance decreases as the flow rate increases. Furthermore, changes in the mass transfer performance decrease considerably with a nonlinear increase in the inlet temperature, and variations of the heat transfer performance are small.