The influence of steel strip spacing on the clamping load of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell stack
LIU Haitao
BAI Shuzhan
WU Minghua
YANG Rongchang
XI Fuqiang
Abstract：To improve the efficiency,stability,and service life of proton exchange membrane fuel cell stacks,a typical large-scale proton exchange membrane fuel cell stack is taken as the research object.An equivalent stiffness model is used to analyze the magnitude of the clamping load of the stack and its uniform distribution in the stack components.At the same time,the porosity and contact resistance values corresponding to different stack clamping load are calculated.The optimal clamping load values and selection criteria for fuel cell stacks under different steel strip spacing conditions are proposed.The results show that as the spacing between steel strips increases,the corresponding optimal clamping load shows an increasing trend.Taking the spacing between steel strips of 40 mm as an example,the corresponding clamping load of 32.8 kN is optimal,and the clamping load is judged to be within a reasonable range based on the stress standard deviation and strain standard deviation.At this point,the corresponding contact resistance is 5.35 μΩ,and the porosity is 0.747.
Keywords：fuel cellequivalent stiffness modelclamping loadporositycontact resistancesteel strip spacing
Publication Date：2025-07-30
Online Publishing Date：2026-05-22(First online date of this platform, not the publication date of the document)
Pages：11( 16-25,63 )