Evaluation of Factors Influencing Performance of PEM Fuel Cell with Thin Separator Channels

Abstract

The authors developed PEM fuel cells consisting of thin separators with the thickness of 0.8mm. The paper investigates the dependence of cell performance on the gas diffusion layer (GDL) thickness, hydrophobic characteristics of GDL, binding contact pressure, channel depth, temperature and water content in the working gases. The result shows that the pressure losses increase inversely proportional to the third power of the cannel depth and it increases significantly for the channel depth less than 0.2mm. The best performance was obtained with a GDL which has relatively lower hydrophobic characteristics. It was also shown that better performance was obtained with relatively thinner GDL for the shallow channels with the depth of 0.3mm used in the experiment. The paper also proposes a simple estimation of liquid water amount in the cell, which may be useful for the water management control.