Catalyst layer-free carbon-coated steel—An easy route to bipolar plates of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells: Characterization on structure and electrochemistry

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

“…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.…”

“…Recently deposition of carbon films on a metallic substrate, such as stainless steel or titanium, are proposed to be used as bipolar plates in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Bipolar plates, that are a multifunctional component, are most important parts in the PEMFC.…”

Reviewing Metallic PEMFC Bipolar Plates

“…Moreover, 304/304L SS showed higher contact resistance than 316/316L SS [33,37,44,45,[56][57][58], which could be related to the lower alloying content [33]. For these reasons, except use in some small-scale demonstration fuel cells [61] or for cladding with another functional layer [62], 304/304L SS has normally acted as a substrate for coating deposition [44,45,[55][56][57][58][59][63][64][65] In addition, some high N-bearing SSs have been evaluated for bipolar plate application [66][67][68] and showed promising results both in simulated PEMFC environments and in stack testing. High N-bearing SS is more economical compared with the conventional SSs.…”

“…Fukutsuka et al [57] used a plasma-assisted CVD process to gain a thin carbon coating of less than 1 l. Coated 304 SS showed significant decreasing in ICR and improved corrosion resistance in simulated PEMFC environments [57]. Carbon-coated 304 SS was carried out by a CVD process, and the produced bipolar plates showed excellent performance and stability, even better ICR and performance than graphite in a stack test [64,65]. Conductive composite coatings on SS for PEMFC bipolar plates have also been actively investigated.…”

Review – Metallic Bipolar Plates and Their Usage in Energy Conversion Systems

“…[54] Another approach for stabilizing metallic bipolar plates in energy conversion environments is to deposit good conducting and inert material compositions onto the metal surfaces. In 2009 Chung and colleagues [12] investigated coatings of carbon, formed from a C 2 H 2 /H 2 gas mixture at 690 °C to 930 °C on SUS304 metal substrates. All reported carbon films in this study showed an improved resistivity for the metal plates to a level comparable to the highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG).…”