Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > An investigation into the use of additive manuf...

Electronic data

  • AM_fuel_cell_plates_10thESEE_JAE_Rev06

    Rights statement: The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10800-015-0832-1

    Accepted author manuscript, 668 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Links

Text available via DOI:

View graph of relations

An investigation into the use of additive manufacture for the production of metallic bipolar plates for polymer electrolyte fuel cell stacks

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>07/2015
<mark>Journal</mark>Journal of Applied Electrochemistry
Issue number7
Volume45
Number of pages9
Pages (from-to)637-645
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date19/04/15
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

The bipolar plate is of critical importance to the efficient and long lasting operation of a polymer electrolyte fuel cell (PEMFC) stack. With advances in membrane electrode assembly design, greater attention has been focused
on the bipolar plate and the important role it plays.
Although carbon composite plates are a likely candidate for the mass introduction of fuel cells, it is metallic plates made from thin strip materials which could deliver significant advantages in terms of part cost, electrical performance and size. However, there are some disadvantages.
Firstly, interfacial stability of the metal interconnect is difficult to achieve. Secondly, and the issue addressed here, is the difficultly and cost in developing new plate designs when there are very significant tooling costs associated
with manufacture. The use of selective laser melting (SLM: an additive manufacturing technique) was explored to produce metallic bipolar plates for PEMFC as a route to inexpensively test several plate designs without committing
to tooling. Crucial to this was proving that, electrically, bipolar plates fabricated by SLM behave similarly to those produced by conventional manufacturing techniques.

This research presents the development of a small stack to compare the short term performance of metallic plates made by machining against those made by SLM. Experimental results demonstrate that the cell performance in this case was unaffected by the manufacturing method used and it is therefore concluded that additive manufacturing could be a very useful tool to aid the rapid development of metallic bipolar plate designs.

Bibliographic note

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10800-015-0832-1