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The vehicular fuel cell stack is unavoidably impacted by the vibration in the real-world usage due to the road unevenness. However, effects of vibration on stacks have yet to be completely understood. In this work, the mechanical integrity and gas-tightness of the stack were investigated through a strengthen road vibration test with a duration of 200 h. The excitation signals applied in the vibration test were simulated by the acceleration of the stack, which were previously measured in a vehicle vibration test. The load signals of the vehicle vibration test were iterated through a road simulator from vehicle acceleration signals which were originally sampled in the proving ground. Frequency sweep test was conducted before and after the vibration test. During the vibration test, mechanical structure inspection and pressure maintaining test of the stack were conducted at regular intervals.

In the assembling process of proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) stack, the clamping load is known to have direct effect on the contact pressure of interfaces. Compression on the membrane electrode assembly (MEA) results in change in gas diffusion layer (GDL), porosity and electrical resistance, thus affecting the performance, durability and reliability of the PEMFC stack. In this paper, the relation between clamping load and performance of PEMFC stack was obtained by experimental study, and the influence of clamping load on the contact pressure of MEAs was analyzed by finite element analysis. The performance test rig was established and the approach of polarization curve testing was introduced. Both the effect of magnitude and distribution of the bolt torques on the performance were taken into account. The finite element model was adopted to figure out the magnitude and uniformity of contact pressure of MEAs, which provides a new angle to understand the experimental results.

Based on the durability cycle test of fuel cell stack and the characteristics of cyclic working conditions, this paper defines the characteristic current point and studies the attenuation rule of the fuel cell stack voltage over time under the characteristic current point. The results show that the voltage of the fuel cell stack appears to be linear downward under the characteristic current point. and the voltage attenuation rate of the fuel cell stack increases quadratically with the increase of the current density in addition to the open-circuit voltage point. Then the coefficient of variation is introduced in statistics as the index to characterize the voltage consistency attenuation of the fuel cell stack, and its variation rule is explored. The results show that the voltage consistency of vehicle fuel cell stack decreases seriously with the increase of running time under the condition of durable cycling.

Life prediction is a major focus for a commercial fuel cell stack, especially applied in fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV). This paper proposes a data driven fuel cell lifetime prediction model using particle swarm optimized back-propagation neural network (PSO-BPNN). For the prediction model PSO-BP, PSO algorithm is used to determine the optimal hyper parameters of BP neural network. In this paper, total voltage of fuel cell stack is employed to represent the health index of fuel cell. Then the proposed prediction model is validated by the aging data from PEMFC stack in FCEV at the actual road condition. The experimental results indicate that PSO-BP model can predict the voltage degradation of PEMFC stack at actual road condition precisely and has a higher prediction accuracy than BP model.