A Fuel Cell Stack Architecture to Make all Cells Have Equal Operational Conditions and Performance

This paper presents a novel architecture for a proton-exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell stack, which is based on the concept that every cell in the stack works at the same condition and thus each cell has the same contribution to the overall output voltage and power. To meet this proposed requirement, special flow distributors were used to evenly distribute fuel and airflow to every fuel cell in the stack. Details of the flow distributor and experimental tests of a four-cell fuel cell stack are presented in the paper. The experimental results demonstrated the desired high performance of the fuel cell stack. It is proved that the novel architecture for fuel cell stack is successful and of significance to the development of high performance fuel cell stacks.