The objective of this work is the prediction of temperature and performance in a molten carbonate fuel cell (MCFC) to obtain design parameters for longer life and higher stability. A three-dimensional numerical analysis model, describing mass, momentum, energy and species equations, has been developed using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique. Especially, a simplified method that considered flow resistance in a gas channel was adopted by Darcy’s law. Moreover, user defined functions have been added to account for the electrochemical reactions in the active areas for generating currents. Simulations were carried out for a unit cell with different flow types. So, this work presented the comparison of co-, counter-, and cross-flow types. Especially, the pattern of temperature and current density distributions was significantly different; the performance curve of counter- and cross-flow types were higher than co-flow type, but the uniformity of temperature distributions for co-flow type was much higher than the others. As a result, the calculation results provided that co-flow type had a little lower electrical power, but more uniform temperature distributions and lower peak cell temperature than counter- and cross-flow types. Thus, in order to improve the mechanical stability and extend the MCFC life in high temperature operations, co-flow type was more effective method to design MCFC stack.