Preparation and characterization of graphite/resin composite bipolar plates for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells

Abstract

Preparing conductive composite bipolar plates for fuel cells by compression molding is a promising research direction. The very key point is how to choose the conductivity filler and binder to meet the requirement. In this article, natural graphite and expanded graphite were used as the filler, and phenolic resin and epoxy resin were used as the binder. The composite bipolar plates were prepared by solution intercalation mixing, compression molding, and curing. The variations in electrical conductivity and mechanical properties were evaluated with the resin content. The results show that the types of fillers and binders have significant effects on the performance of composite bipolar plates, and that the thermal stability of all composite bipolar plates is very good at the fuel-cell working temperature. The corrosion current densities were <16 μA/cm2, which indicates that the composites developed in this work meet many attributes of bipolar plates for use in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells.

Keywords

• compression molding
• corrosion
• performance
• polymer-matrix composite
• thermal properties