On characteristics and research development of coupled fuel cell stack performance and stress

Relevant studies and reviews have been conducted for various stresses distributed in fuel cell stacks and effects on performance from different perspectives, but most of the published literature lack a focus on the coupled characteristics between them. In addition, the commonalities and features of the stresses have not yet been identified and summarized due to differences in stack component materials, operating conditions and application scenarios of various types of fuel cells. One of the main challenges putting on the stack design and configuration is how to keep uniform compression and to compensate the stress fluctuations during its operation, which may be solved by understanding of the coupling characteristics between the stack stress and performance. In this work, an overview and analysis are provided for the characteristics and research developments on this coupling for both solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) and proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) stacks from the perspective of assembly/cycling loads based on available modeling and experimental methods. The attention of the current review is also paid on a balance between the modeling accuracy and computing resource requirement, as well as on experimental clarification of the causal relationships between in- and ex-situ measurements and phenomena observed.