Search Results

Polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are a good candidate for fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) due to their high efficiency, high power density and zero-emission. However, the lifetime is one of the main barriers to overcome before their commercialization. The durability testing methods for PEMFCs are main include electrocatalyst cycle, catalyst support cycle, membrane electrode assembly (MEA) chemical stability, membrane mechanical cycle and so on. In addition, there is little research about MEA chemical stability test, which applies a continuous open-circuit voltage (OCV) to produce more free radicals and these will have a bad influence on PEMFCs. Based on this, the durability of PEMFC was studied under OCV operation at 30% relative humidity (RH), 90 °C and 150 kPa inlet pressure. The electrochemical performances such as in-situ cyclic voltammetry (CV), linear sweep voltage (LSV) and cell polarization were used to evaluate the durability of PEMFC.

Water content estimation is a key problem for studying the PEM fuel cell. When several hundred fuel cells are connected in serial and their active surface area is enlarged for sufficient power, the difference between cells becomes significant with respect to voltage and water content. The voltage of each cell is measurable by the cell voltage monitor (CVM) while it is difficult to estimate water content of the individual. Resistance of the polymer electrolyte membrane is monotonically related to its water content, so that the new online high frequency resistance (HFR) measurement technique is investigated to identify the uniformity of water content between cells and analyze its sensitivity to operating conditions in this paper. Firstly, the accuracy of the proposed technique is experimentally validated to be comparable to that of a commercialized electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurement equipment.