Effect of collector plate resistance on fuel cell stack performance

摘要

The electrical resistance of the collector plate (both bulk and surface resistance) plays a major role in fuel cell stack performance. Energy Partners (EP) has developed molded graphite composite plates with enhanced electrical conductivity, as an alternative to expensive machined graphite. By optimizing collector plate materials, compounding and molding processes, the resistance of the molded collector/backing layer sandwich was reduced by about 12 m OMEGA cm~2. This resulted in an improvement in performance of more than 50 mV per cell at 1 A/cm~2 in a 10-cell stack with 300 cm~2 active area.