Experimental Investigation on the Process-Induced Damage of a Direct Methanol Fuel Cell Assembled by the Printed Circuit Board Technique

摘要

The printed circuit board (PCB)-based direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) package is annovel manufacturing and assembly process, which is full potential in mass production,nand very limited literatures make study on the effects of the related process parameters.nThe hot press is a necessary and key process to make the PCB package, i.e., the keyncomponent of a DMFC, membrane electrode assemblies (MEA), needs to sustain a severentest. In order to minimize the process-induced damage of the MEAs, it is important tonmake a good control on the process parameters. Therefore, the objective of this paper isnto present a methodology to explore a good combination of hot-press parameters. Thenconsidered parameters include the compression ratio of the MEA, heating time, heatingntemperature, and hot pressing pressure acting on the MEA. During the experimentalninvestigation, a series of experiments was made first to discuss the effect of the individualnparameter of the hot-press process on the MEA performance, wherein a reasonable rangenof each process parameter condition was able to be well defined. Moreover, the Taguchinexperimental method was adopted to explore the parameter effects on the DMFC performancenduring the digital packaging process and to determine the best combination ofnparameter conditions. At the end, a MEA was made a hot press under the best parameterncombination, which could verify the result obtained from Taguchi’s experiments. Thenresult is able to be an important reference for the future manufacturing design guidelinenof PCB-based DMFC package.