Production of Ni-P Amorphous Alloy-Coated Bipolar Plate for PEM Fuel Cell by Electro-Less Plating

Abstract

In this work, electro-less plating was adopted to produce a new metallic bipolar plate coated with amorphous alloy. The Ni-P amorphous alloy thin film was deposited on Al plate with a bipolar plate flow field and its corrosion resistance and contact electrical resistance were measured. As results, it was found that the electro-less plated Ni-P amorphous thin film showed much lower corrosion resistance than the Ni-Cr-P-B metallic glass because of its lack of Cr content and also found that the Ni-P film showed lower contact electrical resistance than the stainless steel SUS316L plate.
The electricity generation tests with the single cell having the Ni-P amorphous alloy-coated bipolar plates produced in this study revealed that the single cell with the Ni-P amorphous alloy-coated bipolar plates showed excellent I-V performance as well as the cell with the carbon bipolar plates after 39th repetition. However, the I-V performance degraded gradually and was found to be much lower than that with the carbon bipolar plates after 50th repetition. Then the long time durability tests for 24 h were also conducted at the constant current density of 200 mA·cm⁻². It was found that the cell voltage of the single cell with the Ni-P amorphous alloy-coated bipolar plates decreased gradually with time.