Development of low cost miniature aluminium bipolar plates for PEM fuel cells (PEMFC)

• Main Author: Chen, Hongyu.
• Other Authors: Chen Zhong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Materials::Energy materials
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/18938
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With increasing seriousness of environmental issue regarding greenhouse gas (GHS) growth, the demand for development of fuel cell technology in automotive application receives raised attention this decade. Among different fuel cell, PEM fuel cell seems to be the most promising candidate. Bipolar plate is one of the most important components in the PEM fuel cell, accounting for 45% of the total stack cost. Minimizing the cost and enhancing the performance of bipolar plates becomes one hot research and development area in order to widely commercialize fuel cell in the future. Currently, graphite is the main commercialized plates, but its porous nature, poor mechanical properties, and high cost for mass volume production hinders its large scale commercialization. Metallic plates have high electrical conductivitiy, high termal conductivity, excellent mechanical properties, and lower cost over mass production, which are more promising for bipolar plate. However, most metals are easily corroded under thea cidic and corrosive fuel cell working environment. One possible solution is to coat a protection layer on the base metal. In this report, Au coating and different layers of carbon-paste-coating were investigated in terms of the corrosion resistance and contact resistance. Potentiondynamic polarization tests were applied on both sample plates and real fuel cell to study the corrosion resistance and fuel cell performance. SEM was used to examine the surface morphology of the tested samples before and after polarization tests. Furthermore, different carbon-past-coating thicknesses were carried out to optimize the thickness in this study.