Abstract

New fuel cell stacks are being developed with the aim of improving productivity while maintaining the same quality for mass production. In particular, the time it takes to perform shorting inspection of the membrane electrode assembly is an issue that limits productivity, so development has been conducted to help reduce this time. Conventional shorting inspection on flat bases detects the electrical characteristic values of the entire membrane electrode assembly. In this approach, signals of local short circuits are small relative to the change in detected value due to the charge, and thus they could not be judged until the change was complete. In the development discussed in this paper, the detection sensitivity for signals in each local area was increased by using a split-terminal base. Shorting signals greater than the charge change were successfully detected locally. This lowered the impact on the inspection judgment, and the measurement waiting time caused by charging was lowered by 87% compared with the conventional method. In addition, the researchers developed an algorithm for synthesizing peripheral currents to deal with the misjudgment factor of a short circuit in the terminal gap, which presented an issue in the use of split bases. As a result, inspection total time was reduced to 10 seconds, thus contributing greatly to increasing cell productivity.

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Author (organization or company)

• Hiroaki KAWANISHI（Innovative Research Excellence, Power Unit & Energy）
• Hiroyuki YAMAGISHI（Honda Motor Co., Ltd.）
• Kensuke NANBA（Innovative Research Excellence, Power Unit & Energy）

Publication Information

Article of Honda R&D Technical Review Vol.37 (41 - 48)

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Citation Information