BiFoilStack – Novel cell and stack design with compound-foil-based bipolar plates for heavy-duty fuel cell systems

Authors

M. Zubel, M. Walters - FEV Europe GmbH, J. Toussaint - tme, RWTH Aachen University, M. Soddemann, J. Kadlcak, S. Dechent, F. Laubacher, S. Jafari, P. Keller, J. Ott - Dätwyler Schweiz AG

Summary

Fuel cells for heavy-duty commercial vehicles must have a long service life of over 30,000 hours. This applies in particular to long haul transport. This high lifetime requirement is challenging for many components, such as the fuel cell’s metallic bipolar plates. These types of bipolar plate are prone to corrosion due to the humid and acidic environment in the cell. Therefore, the plates are often manufactured from e. g. high-grade titanium alloys and are usually coated, making them inherently expensive. For lifetime improvements metallic bipolar plates can be substituted by corrosion-resistant graphite plates. Compared to metallic plates, however, these are much thicker, and the manufacturing processes do not lend themselves to cost-effective, high-volume production.

Against this background, the publicly funded project »BiFoilStack« will further develop novel composite bipolar foils with regard to the specific requirements of fuel cell stacks for heavy-duty applications and elaborate cost effective scalable industrial processes for conversion of the foils into BPP and derive proprietary cell and stack designs to exploit the additional design freedoms offered by the material. The novel material has the potential of being a disruptive technology by combining the helpful properties of metallic and graphitic plates – substrate thickness close to metal, superior corrosion resistance and cost-effective production processes. This publication provides and over-view of the research project and gives insights into the conceptual cell and stack design or fuel cells based on the novel compound bipolar foils. During this phase, computational methods such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are used to evaluate and improve distinct designs before moving into the prototype development and testing.