Robust design for the precision forming of metallic bipolar plates of proton exchange membrane fuel cell

Metallic bipolar plates (BPs) are important components of the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) which feature large-area dense microchannels. Due to the trans-scale nature of metallic BPs, the frequent local rupture and failure of the microchannels have been a critical problem during the forming process due to the variation of tooling accuracy and material properties. How to design those parameters considering the robustness of the forming process is a key issue to be conquered for the efficient and mass-production of BPs towards PEMFC commercialization. To address that, a detailed discussion was made in this work to find out how the deviations of different processing parameters (r
p
, r
d
, s) and material properties (K, n, ε
0
, and to) affect the thinning behavior in the forming of micro-channels in the bipolar plates. Through actual statistics, finite element simulation, and robust model construction, the influence of the material parameters as well as the characteristic dimensions of the tool on the forming robustness of the bipolar plate was discussed and analyzed. A robust design of the metallic bipolar plate forming process was made by controlling the expectation level and the variance.