Characterization of a fuel cell stack for use in material handling applications

This work investigates a fuel cell stack which is often used in material handling devices. Parametric analysis to investigate the effects of stoichiometry, temperature and pressure is carried out with the use of polarization curves and impedance spectroscopy, on both stack and single cell level. Fuel cell stacks incorporating a large number of cells, e.g. automotive fuel cells, are often reduced to short stacks for scientific characterization containing only a few cells. Therefore, we compare two stacks of the same kind, but with different cell counts. This provides information whether data derived by characterizing short stacks can be transferred to full stacks. Finally, performance data of this stack is compared to other stacks used in automotive applications. Due to the ongoing experimental work this extended abstract presents only few results but gives an overview of the scientific approach.