In this paper a numerical analysis was applied to evaluate performance of square tubular Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) with three different architectures of catalyst (CL), membrane and gas diffusion layer (GDL). Three different cases were investigated for cathode and anode which are square peripheral (SP), square chordal (SC) and square bisectors (SB). Commercial computational fluid dynamic code (CFD) was employed for solving conservative form of continuity and momentum, species transportation and energy equations. The obtained polarity curve was validated with experimental data for base model and then, this curve and the related power density was compared with conventional base PEM fuel cell model. The results indicated that all of the three square tubular architectures with different layers have better performance compared to base model and higher current densities could be achieved via these architectures. Among the three mentioned cases, SC had the highest current density and power density compared to SP and SB cases. SC had also higher hydrogen and oxygen consumption compared to two other cases because of uniform reaction in allover the area and elimination of regions in which the reaction is slow (i.e. Dead zone). The results showed the amount of hydrogen consumption at the cathode along the channel for SP, SC, SB cases 63.8%, 94% and 79.16% respectively, relative to input hydrogen amounts. Also, comparison of water concentration values for three SP, SC and SB cases showed 35.6%, 49.5% and 43.57% of inlet values respectively. This confirms that reaction taken place in SC is maximum. This research proves that, higher power densities could be achieved by employing different geometries and different arrangement of layers, which could considerably reduce the cost while improving efficiency of tubular PEM's. (C) 2016 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.