No abstract

The fuel cell is a very promising power generation system combining the benefits of extremely low emissions, high efficiency, ease of maintenance and durability. In order to promote the commercialization of fuel cells, a flexible forming process, in which a hyper-elastic rubber is adopted as a medium to transmit forming pressure, is suggested as an efficient and cost effective manufacturing method for fuel cell bipolar plates. In this study, the ability of this flexible forming process to produce the micro channel arrays on metallic bipolar plates was first demonstrated experimentally. Then, a finite element (FE) model was built and validated through comparisons between simulated and experimental results. The effects of key process parameters on the forming performance such as applied load and punch velocity were investigated. As a result, appropriate process parameter values allowing high dimensional accuracy without failure were suggested.

Microforming is a very efficient and economical technology to fabricate very small metallic parts in various applications.In order to extend the use of this forming technology for the production of microparts, the size effect, which occurs with the reduction of part size and affects the forming process significantly, must be thoroughly investigated. In this study, the tribological size effect in microforming was studied using modeling and scaled ring compression experiments. A micro-scale friction approach based on the slip-line field theory and lubricant pocket model was used to understand the friction mechanism and explain the tribological size effect. Ring compression tests were performed to analyze the interfacial friction condition from the deformation characteristics of the ring specimens. In addition, finite element analysis results were utilized to quantitatively determine the size-dependent frictional behavior of materials in various process conditions. By comparing theoretical results and experimental measurements for different size factors, the accuracy and reliability of the model were verified.