The durability investigation of a 10-cell metal bipolar plate proton exchange membrane fuel cell stack

The metal bipolar plates (BPs) have replaced the graphite BPs in vehicle-used proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) stack because of their high volume power density. To investigate the durability of metal BP stack, this paper performed a durability test of 2000 hours on a 10-cell metal BP fuel cell stack. The degradations of the average voltage and individual cell voltage in fuel cell stack were analyzed. To investigate the degradation mechanism, the stack was disassembled and the morphologies and compositions of no. 1, no. 5, and no. 10 cells after 2000 hours were characterized by SEM, TEM, and ASS. The results indicated that at 800 mA/cm(2), the voltage decay rate is 42.303 mu V/hour and the voltage decay percentage of the stack is 14.34% after 2000 hours according to the linearly fitting result. According to the US Department of Energy (DOE) definition of fuel cell stack life, only the voltage decay rate of OCV and the tenth cell is lower than the maximum voltage degradation rates of 10 000 hours. The decreases of homogeneity of stack were the main reason for its performance degradation. Especially for the tenth cell, its performance has almost no drop. The main failure reason of this metal BP stack is structural design rather than metal corrosion. The losses of Pt catalyst and C supporting are the main reason of performance degradation.