This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). This article has been retracted at the request of the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy Ethics Board as the sections 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3 have plagiarized parts of the book chapter Polymer electrolyte fuel cells, S. Gottesfeld and T.A. Zawodzinski, in: Alkire et al (Eds), Advances in Electrochemical Science and Engineering vol. 5, Weinheim, Germany, Wiley-VCH 1997 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9783527616794. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents an abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.