Prototype Tooling for Bipolar Plates Challenges Additive Manufacturing

Fuel cells offer a sustainable solution for providing electric drive energy in the course of advancing e-mobility. Essential components of the fuel cell represent the bipolar plates, which are being produced in ever higher quantities from thinner and thinner materials. Consequently, this leads to high requirements on the precision and robustness of corresponding production processes as well as associated tool designs for such bipolar plates. In order to ensure these requirements at an early stage of forming process planning, especially with regard to the tool design, the use of prototype tools has become inevitable. However, there is currently no cost- and time-efficient way of producing prototype tools for bipolar plates that may be considered as rapid prototyping. In general, prototype tools made from steel alloys are used here, which are manufactured by costly high-precision milling processes. Hence, this paper pursues the approach of producing low-cost prototype tools from synthetic materials by means of additive manufacturing. As a proof of concept, experimental investigations were carried out comparing dimensional accuracy of downscaled bipolar plates made of 1.4404 stainless-steel produced by using a printed plastic tool on the one hand and a milled steel tool on the other.