Abstract
Fuel cells directly convert chemical energy into electrical energy with high efficiency and minimal environmental impact, and are promising energy conversion systems for portable, automotive, and stationary power applications. Although significant progress has been made in the past decades in terms of overall performance, power density, and cost reduction, the performance degradation of fuel cells with use continues to be an important barrier to commercialization. Understanding the degradation mechanisms in fuel cells is a critical area of study which has motivated many efforts to develop and apply advanced high resolution techniques to characterize and quantify the state of various chemical species and components before, during and after fuel cell operation. This chapter discusses the most relevant in-situ and ex-situ diagnostic tools for fuel cell degradation studies and categorizes them as: optical visualization, neutron imaging, electron spectroscopy and microscopy, X-ray techniques, magnetic resonance imaging, and thermal mapping. It reveals that while a few techniques have been successfully employed for studying degradation to date, there exists a significant opportunity to apply some powerful, yet under-utilized, tools for this purpose. Unlike direct optical visualization, these methods are able to obtain sub-surface information about transport phenomena occurring inside the material, or under certain components within the fuel cell and inside the electrode and membrane. The unique insight provided by these techniques, however, is somewhat limited by their lower spatial and temporal resolutions. Various combinations of the diagnostic techniques discussed in this chapter could be developed to create a comprehensive understanding of fuel cell degradation in the future.
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