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M Thimothée Drugeot will present his thesis "Understanding of degradation mechanisms and quantification of performance losses in a Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell during shut-down/start-up phases"
The Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell is a promising "low carbon" technology to power electric vehicles. However, the shut-down and start-up phases have been identified as critical events because the existence of a transient H2|Air front on the anode side causes the circulation of internal currents leading to huge degradation reactions within the cathode catalytic layer. The performance and ultimately the lifetime of the cell are thus strongly altered. Although these degradation mechanisms have been studied at small scale, the implementation of mitigation strategies at stack/system scale remains insufficient to meet the lifetime requirements. This thesis is therefore interested in understanding the degradation mechanisms and quantifying the performance losses at the representative scale of a state-of-the-art cell design as a function of shut-down and start-up conditions. This is achieved through:
Date of update February 28, 2023