A Study of Contact Pressure with Thermo-Mechanical Coupled Action for a Full-Dimensional PEMFC Stack

The contact pressure between bipolar plates (BPPs) and a membrane electrode assembly (MEA) has a key impact on Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) performance. However, it is difficult to obtain the contact pressure combined with operating temperature action via the finite element analysis (FEA) model, resulting in limited calculation resources for the problem of multiscale and thermo-mechanical coupled action in a full-dimensional fuel cell stack. This paper establishes an equivalent stiffness model for contact pressure, which could be predicted simply and quickly compared with the FEA model. Then, this presented model is validated by experimentation with a full-dimensional fuel cell stack assembled with 10 cells using pressure-sensitive film. The error between the presented model and the experimentation of the full-dimensional stack is a maximum of 4.41%. This work provides important insight into thermo-mechanical coupled action, as less empirical testing is required to identify the contact pressure in a full-dimensional fuel cell stack.