Experimental Results with Fuel Cell Start-up and Shut-down. Impact of Type of Carbon for Cathode Catalyst Support
Abstract
Separate testing protocols for fuel cell startups and shutdowns were developed to distinguish between their effects on reverse currents and CO2 evolution. The internal currents and the local potentials were measured with different membrane-electrode assemblies (MEAs): we examined the influence of the type of carbon for cathode catalyst support as well as the mitigating effect of low anode Pt loading. Significant differences were observed and the experiments also confirmed previous results that the evolved CO2 accounts for less than 25% of the total exchanged charge.