Fundamental studies of materials, designs, and models development for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell flow field distributors

Fuel cells are becoming a popular source of energy due to their promising performance and availability. However, the high cost of fuel cell stack forbids its deployment to end user. Moreover, bipolar plate is one of the critical components in current polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) system, causing severe increase in manufacturing cost.;The objective of this research work is to develop new materials, design and manufacturing process for bipolar plates. The materials proposed for use were tested for corrosion resistance in simulated fuel cell conditions. After corrosion studies copper alloy (C17200) and Low Temperature Carburized (LTC) SS 316 were selected as an alternative material for bipolar plate. It was observed that though the copper alloy offered good resistance in corrosive atmosphere, the major advantage of using the alloys was good conductivity even after formation of corrosion layer compared to SS 316. However, LTC SS 316 achieved the best corrosion resistance (ever reported in current open literature at relatively low cost) with decreased contact resistance, as compared to SS 316.;Due to the expensive and tedious machining for bipolar plate manufacturing, the conventional machining process was not used. Bipolar plates were manufactured from thin corrugated sheets formed of the alloy. This research also proposed a novel single channel convoluted flow field design which was developed by increasing the tortuosity of conventional serpentine design. The CFD model for novel single channel convoluted design showed uniform distribution of velocity over the entire three dimensional domain. The novel design was further studied using pressure drop and permeability models. These modeling calculations showed substantial benefit in using corrugated sheet design and novel single channel convoluted flow field design.;All the concepts of materials (except for LTC SS 316), manufacturing and design are validated using various tests like long term stability, and polarization plots. The fuel cell experiments showed phenomenal increase in performance of the system by using novel single channel convoluted flow field design and corrugated sheet design. Moreover, the reason for this improved performance agrees very well with the equivalent flow field permeability values of these designs.