Corrosion behavior of two bipolar plate materials in simulated PEMFC environment by electrochemical noise technique

A comparison of carbon coated and uncoated 316L stainless steel for using as bipolar plates in PEMFCs

“…One of the important properties of bipolar plate in PEMFC is low interface contact resistance (ICR) and high conductivity due to minimizing ohms losses and increasing the output power efficiency of the fuel cell. Generally, it is reported that the ICR value should be less than 20 m cm 2 for 140 N/cm 2 clamping force [16][17][18]. At 150 N/cm 2 compaction force, ICR is around 5 m cm 2 for carbon coated 316L stainless steel which is very low in comparison with that of uncoated 316L stainless steel (280 m cm 2 ).…”

“…For carbon coated 316L stainless steel, the corrosion current density is less than 1.6 × 10 −6 A/cm 2 which is a value recommended by Department of Energy (DOE) as a target value until 2010 [16][17][18].…”

“…AFM analysis was used to evaluate the morphology of the carbon film. There is a conventional method to measure interfacial contact resistance (ICR) for bipolar plates in PEMFCs [10][11][12][13][14]17,18]. In this method two pieces of carbon paper are sandwiched between the sample and two copper plates.…”

“…But their corrosion resistance in PEMFC environment is unsatisfactory. Also, the high electrical resistant passive layer on stainless steel has a significant role to increase ohm losses in fuel cells [18]. Amorphous carbon films with low sp 3 bands have a high chemical stability with low electrical resistance [2,3].…”

Corrosion Performance of Austenitic Stainless Steel Bipolar Plates for Nafion- and Room-Temperature Ionic-Liquid-Based PEMFCs

“…The published durability test methods include: (i) open circuit potential measurements [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15], (ii) potentiostatic polarisation [7][8][9][10][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30], (iii) polarisation resistance [27,31,32], (iv) linear-sweep voltammetry [7,33,34], (v) I-V and I-P curves and life time tests in fuel-cell *Address correspondence to this author at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Innovazione, Università del Salento, via Monteroni, 73100 Lecce, Italy; Tel: +39 0832297621, +39 0832297290; E-mail: benedetto.bozzini@unisalento.it assemblies [24,[35][36][37]. These electrochemical tests have been accompanied by compositional and structural measurements: for relevant details, refer to [2].…”