Research on electrochemical impedance spectroscope behavior of fuel cell stack under different reactant relative humidity

Abstract

The reactant relative humidity (RH) is a key parameter to keep a suitable water content in the large active area fuel cell. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) is one of the effective methods to identify the water state within the membrane. In this work, the EIS behavior of fuel cell stack under different reactant RH and current density is investigated. Both the whole stack and individual cell impedances are experimentally measured. The internal reactions of the stack and individual cells with different current densities and different reactants RH can be distinguished by impedances. Based on the experiment results, the low frequency impedance has a greater variation than high frequency impedance when the reactant RH changes. And the impedance is more sensitive to the reactant RH under low current density. With the current density increases, the internal self-humidification can be realized to obtain a good performance for large area fuel cells.