The Impact of Carbon Stability on PEM Fuel Cell Startup and Shutdown Voltage Degradation

By P. T. Yu, W. Gu, Rohit Makharia, F. Wagner, H. Gasteiger. 2006

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Conventional carbon MEAs and graphitized carbon MEAs were evaluated for the resistance to carbon corrosion and startup/shutdown durability in this paper. Graphitized carbon MEAs show higher resistance to carbon corrosion than conventional carbon MEAs by a factor of 35 at a point where 5% weight loss had occurred. A graphitized carbon MEA yielded lower degradation rate than that of a conventional carbon MEA by a factor of 5 after 1,000 startup/shutdown cycles. The kinetics of carbon corrosion over both conventional carbon MEAs and graphitized carbon MEAs were measured, and carbon corrosion during startup/shutdown was explained and modeled. The model results correlate to what we have measured from our startup/shutdown durability test. Overall, MEAs with corrosion resistant carbon supports are one of major materials approaches to mitigate cell voltage degradation due to fuel cell startup/shutdown. We believe that a combination of corrosion resistant materials and system operating mitigation strategies is the path to attain the strict automotive durability targets.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/90429ac2349f2628a4becb1c9e5f6c6cc79eb3f3