Analysis of Stainless Steel Bipolar Plates Micro-Stamping Processes

Bipolar plate is one of the key components of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC). Since the production costs of traditional graphite bipolar plates are very expensive and need a few millimeters thickness over the space, the resulting metal bipolar plate not only reduces the cost of such a bipolar plate, the thickness can also be reduced to micron range. This study aims to explore the application of micro-stamping technology to produce thin metal bipolar plates with the relevant process parameters. Regarding the use of rigid punch on 50 mu m-thick stainless steel sheet (SUS 304) for micro-channel stamping process in this study, the channel design is 0.8*0.75mm. Besides, the finite element method and the experimental results are used to analyze the micro-stamping process key parameters. In this study, traditional material model and the scale-factor modified material model are used for simulation. The experimental results verified by the modified material model are more realistic to products and have better similarity, as the punch load is relatively small. The results demonstrate that the use of micro-stamping production of thin metal bipolar plates could not only reduce the production cost, but could also speed up the process. In this paper, using ULF (updated Lagrangian formulation) concept to establish an elastic-plastic deformation finite element analysis model and using scale-factor to modify the calculation could effectively simulate the micro-stamping process for metal bipolar plates.