Objective of the Work Package

The overall objective of WP7 is to produce stacks and evaluate cell and stack improvements from the whole development process within the project. Three kinds of stack tests are planned: stack production including quality control (QC), short term aggressive stack testing and long term stack testing. The QC tests are carried out by TOFC directly after stack production and follow a standardized procedure to check specific parameters such as leakage rate, ASR or dimensions. Short term aggressive stack testing is also performed by TOFC. In this test the stack will be tested under multiple conditions including internal reforming in full and part load. The long term tests are split between AVL and JRC and aim at 4000 h of operation for each stack test in order to demonstrate the reliability.

Specific Challenge

In this project, several cell and stack campaigns are planned aiming at a continuous process of improving the stack performance and eventually demonstrating the improved reliability by long term stack tests. In order to compare the performance of different cell and stack generations, the same test program has to be performed for each long term stack test. Therefore, it is important to ensure similar testing conditions to compare the results. The test program is based on the reliability analysis developed in WP5 to address specific failure mechanisms during the tests and accelerate them if possible. Since the reliability targets are based on a stationary application, long term testing is necessary. Testing a standard stack makes it difficult to measure parameters such as temperature or mechanical stresses inside the stack. Such measurements require significant adaptions of the stack design which would influence the thermal and mechanical behavior in a way that makes it difficult to correlate the results with the standard stack design. Therefore, during the tests a comprehensive temperature measurement on the outer surface of the stack housing and cell voltage monitoring is carried out to gather important data for the thermal and mechanical stack simulation without changing the stack design.

Work Package Leader:

Organisation: AVL List GmbH

Name: Martin Hauth