Running Period:01.04.2009-31.03.2011
Project's Theme: It has been well recognized that fuel cell technology presents a unique solution to the problems of diminishing fossil fuel resources and increasing environmental concerns. Commercialization of fuel cell technology will bring tremendous social and economic benefits to both Canada and Germany. The PEM fuel cell, among differrent types of fuel cells, is the most mainstream technology due to its wide applications and as the sole suitable fuel cell technology for transportation applications. The Canadian fuel cell industry is mainly based on PEM fuel cells and Germany’s fuel cell industry also has a huge share of PEM-based fuel cells including.
The main technology barriers to the commercialization of PEM fuel cell technology are durability and cost. Joint international efforts are recognized by different countries as an effective way to overcome the technology barriers. Therefore, NRC institutes, including IFCI, ICPET and IMI, and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), all of who have strong PEM fuel cell research programs, are proposing to join hands to study the durability issues for the MEA, the most critical part of PEM fuel cells. The cooperative research project will leverage each other’s resources and fully utilize the different capabilities of each institute to gain fundamental understanding of the failure modes and degradation mechanisms of PEM fuel cell MEAs. The knowledge generated from this cooperative research project will be critical to both Canadian and German fuel cell industries to improve their fuel cell designs for longer lifetimes. Industry involvement in this cooperative research project will facilitate direct diffusion of the knowledge generated by this cooperative research project to industry.This cooperative research project will lay out the foundation for longer-term collaboration with expanded research scopes between Canadian and German researchers. It is hoped that an international consortium could be developed, based on this cooperative research project, to carry out research on critical issues of PEM fuel cells to accelerate the commercialization process of PEM fuel cell technology.
Work done within the group Analytics und Methodics: Analytics (XPS, IR, REM/EDX), locally dissolved Impedanzspectroscopie
Head of Project: Prof. Dr. A. Friedrich / Dr. H. Wang (NRC)
Partners: NRC-IFCI, NRC-ICPET, NRC-IMI
Finances: HGF