Analysis of design parameters of fuel cell stack design for vehicle level performance enhancement

The design of the fuel cell stack for enhanced power and voltage characteristics is essential as it impacts the drivability of the vehicles. While many experimental approaches have been explored to improve the performance of the fuel cell stack by refining its design, they are largely limited to trial-and-error based approaches. Hence, the task of identifying the critical parameters affecting the performance of the fuel cell stack becomes tedious. The process is further complicated when many parameters have a counterbalancing impact on the stack performance. To help refine the design process of the fuel cell stack for enhancing the performance, a sensitivity analysis based approach is proposed in this paper in which a mathematical model of the fuel cell stack relating the parameters and stack power, and voltage is used. As a baseline the reliability of the mathematical model is presented first demonstrating its utility for the current study. The parameters used include membrane thickness, gas diffusion layer thickness, limiting current density, anode current density, transfer coefficient of the anode, and transfer coefficient of the cathode. To capture the counterbalancing impact the parameters can have on the stack performance, individual and total sensitivity of each of these parameters is determined in this work to give the stack designer an understanding of the overall role these parameters play. Based on this analysis, we present a ranking of the parameters in the order of the most impactful for the stack performance. Such analysis helps in refining the design of the fuel cell stack for maximizing the power output from the stack and ensuring that the voltage requirements at the vehicle level are met.