Journal
FUEL
Volume 230, Issue -, Pages 98-103Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.fuel.2018.05.062
Keywords
Proton exchange membrane fuel cell; Conditioning/break-in/incubation procedure; Serpentine and straight-parallel flow-field layouts; Membrane electrode assembly conditioning
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Funding
- Ontario-China Research and Innovation Fund (OCRIF)
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
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The importance of membrane electrode assembly (MEA) conditioning for proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells under various operating conditions, such as reactant flow and cell voltage-current combination, has been well recognized, but few studies have considered the impact of the cell hardware design. In this study, the impact of flow-field layout on the conditioning of MEAs has been experimentally investigated. It is shown that the MEAs conditioned with serpentine flow-field layouts on both the anode and cathode side have better performance than the MEAs conditioned with straight-parallel flow-field layouts, and that the peak power density can be increased from 0.83 W/cm(2) to 0.93 W/cm(2) (about 12% increase) for the MEAs tested under the same operating condition of using humidified hydrogen and air at atmospheric pressure. This performance improvement is mainly due to the under-rib convection of the reactant gases in serpentine flow-field layouts that provides more uniform conditioning of the entire MEAs, compared with the MEAs conditioned with straight-parallel flow-field layouts for which the portion of the MEAs under the rib is not well conditioned, due to the lack of the reactant flow there.
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