Metal-insert technique for polypropylene composite bipolar plate manufacturing

Abstract

A single cell of direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) typically delivers an electrical potential between 0.5 and 1 V; thus DMFCs are assembled in parallel to meet power demands (1–5 kW). Bipolar plates (BPs) are the primary components connecting a single cell to the adjacent cells so that they provide optimum electrical conductivity. The objective of this research is to reduce the volume resistance of BPs made from a polypropylene/carbon composite by utilizing a metal insert technique. A major obstacle when it comes to molding composite plates inserted by a thin metal sheet is the delamination of material layers after the cooling process. The delamination issue is due to different surface polarities between metal and polypropylene-composite surfaces. One of the strategies to solve this issue is to modify the surface of one layer for creating similarity of the surface polarity. A metal sheet surface was coated with graphene using a cold spraying technique to enhance adhesion ability. The suitable spraying conditions were determined by experimenting with varying temperature, pressure, graphene quantity and graphene types. The effectiveness of surface modification by the graphene spraying technique was assessed by a surface morphology observation, an electrical conductivity measurement and DMFC performance tests. Results were interesting, they indicated that when DMFC was assembled with silver sheet, inserted BPs provided 25.13 mW/cm2 of power density, 3,350.7 mWh of generated energy and 67% of efficiency. This highlights that the performance of a BP prototype is superior to the performance of a commercial composite bipolar plate.