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• A novel airfoil flow field is proposed for fuel cells. • Airfoil flow field can enhance mass transfer while maintain low pressure drop. • Fuel cell with airfoil flow field is evaluated via experimental test and simulation. • Airfoil flow field increases the fuel cell's maximum power density effectively. • Airfoil flow field promotes the uniform distributions in fuel cells. Optimal configuration of bipolar plate (BP) embedding flow field is of great significance in improving the power density and durability of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). Inspired by the airfoil in aircraft dividing the airflow into two streams causing pressure difference, a novel airfoil flow field (AFF) is designed to enhance the mass transfer capacity in channel and across the rib between two adjacent channels, which hardly increases the pressure drop in channel, unlike many baffle designs. The performance improvement achieved by implementing AFF in PEMFC is compared with common parallel flow field (PFF) and the wave flow field (WFF) by experimental test with respect to polarization curve and electrochemical loss and numerical simulation via a three-dimensional (3D) PEMFC model. The experimental results indicate that the novel AFF exhibits best fuel cell performance at various operation conditions (e.g. relative humidity, air stoichiometric ratio) mainly benefitted from the enhanced oxygen transfer, which contributes to the improvement of maximum power density by 8.85 % and 14.37 % compared to PFF and WFF, respectively. The modeling results indicate that the pressure drop increase in AFF is negligible compared with PFF, and is even slightly lower than WFF, indicating high practicability. Moreover, the utilization of AFF also helps the uniformity of oxygen concentration, current density and temperature in PEMFC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]