Mitigation strategies for hydrogen starvation under dynamic loading in proton exchange membrane fuel cells

Hydrogen starvation in a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell during dynamic loading can have detrimental effects to cell performance, causing significant degradations to cell components and reduce stack durability. In this study, mitigation strategies for hydrogen starvation are proposed and effectiveness of the approaches is studied by measuring variations of local current densities and temperatures in situ under various load change scenarios. A two-step startup strategy is studied and the experimental results show that current undershoots in the downstream and the region with zero current at the outlet can be completely eliminated. Experimental studies have also been conducted to examine the effectiveness of a hydrogen reservoir at the anode outlet and the results show that it can significantly reduce the fluctuations in both local current densities and temperatures under both potentiostatic and galvanostatic modes.