Reliability Improvement in Modelling a Hollow Fiber Membrane Humidifier Using the Response Surface Method

– Water transport through the membrane represents the performance of a membrane humidifier, which is widely employed in fuel cell applications. Precise evaluation of this process is a foundation for system simulation, contributing to cost minimization. Conducting experiment s for parametric analysis of water transport is a fundamental step in measuring reliable data to establish a correlation between the humidifier performance and operating conditions. This correlation should be proposed with minimal deviation to improve the reliability of the entire system. This study presents humidifier lumped models with different definitions of water diffusion through the hollow fiber membrane. The assumption of constant diffusivity in the membrane causes an overestimation in predicting the humidifier performance, with an average deviation of 10.75%. The selected model for system simulation is based on the response surface fitting function for the number of transfer units (NTU). This function helped minimize the deviation between simulation results and experimental data on water transport in a hollow fiber membrane humidifier . The average deviation in this case is 5.68%.