**7. Conclusion**

The decarbonization of power grids and the development of electric vehicles and renewable resources are promoting researches on advanced fuel cells for both stationary and mobile applications. Several programs are running that aim at reducing costs and improve performance and duration. These researches can be strongly supported by numerical models which are the core of a computer-aided engineering approach capable of reducing tentative experimentation by selecting those solutions which result more competitive on the basis of analytical/numerical computations, both in terms of device design and its operation. Effective models must take into account all relevant chemical-physical-electrical quantities, their interdependence, and their evolutions. These models play an interactive game with diagnostic and measurement issues, because their reliability depends on their fitting to the cases under investigation and this occurrence involves the determination of the many parameters used in nonlinear equations. Design optimizations based on numerical procedures are strong tools not only in identifying device materials and geometries capable of competitive performance, but also in determining the whole FC system, including static converters and system supervisors.

Fuel cell computational modeling confirms to be an important topic of applied research, involving multiphysics, multiscale problems which are still challenging for the researchers working on this subject, both at the scientific and industrial level.

### **Acknowledgements**

This work was supported by MAESTRA 2011—"From Materials for Membrane-Electrode Assemblies to Electric Energy Conversion and Storage Devices," the 2011 University of Padua Strategic Project cod. STPD11XNRY\_002.

*Distributed and Lumped Parameter Models for Fuel Cells DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.89048*
