A Numerical Investigation of The Fracture Energy of Materials for Fuel Cell End Plates

Nowadays, with increasing energy requirements, the use of clean energy resources has become important. Fuel cells are an important key for clean energy technology due to wide range of utilization areas such as automotive, portable power applications, electricity generation, space, aviation and naval technologies. Additionally, they have many significant properties such as not producing harmful gases, therefore they do not cause environmental and chemical pollution. Besides, they have not any moving parts, also they do not produce noise. By comparison to fossil fuel, fuel cells have high efficiency that reaches up to 60% in appropriate conditions. Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) has many advantages than other fuel cell types due to simple structure, higher efficiency and low operating temperature. PEMFC may consist of one or more stacks to generate more electricity. End plate of PEMFC holds together all parts of it. Therefore, the material selection for end plate is important to provide safe conditions. To use PEMFC safely, investigation of material fracture energy is required to decide that the material is in safe conditions or not. There are three fracture energy modes which are mode I, mode II and mode III. There are many methods to investigate failure of material at different modes. Unlike other methods, Arcan specimen gives facility to evaluate of mode I, mode II and mixed modes. The main purpose of this paper was to compare the results of fracture energy (stain energy release rate) of different materials for end plates in fuel cells. Another goal was to select a sutitable material was selected as PEMFC end plate.